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Features vintage music by Cab Calloway, Tex Beneke and Charlie Spivak. We also learn a bit about bandleader Tommy Tucker. Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat. Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * The music featured in this podcast is considered Public Domain. Artists are credited within the podcast.
Features vintage recordings by Tex Beneke, The King Sisters and Sammy Kaye. Ronnaldo celebrates Swing City Radio's Fifth Anniversary. Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat. Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * The music featured in this podcast is considered Public Domain. Artists are credited within the podcast.
Nach dem Tod Glenn Millers wurde das Orchester für ein paar Jahre von dessen größtem Star-Solisten Tex Beneke (Gesang und Tenorsaxophon) weitergeführt. Sein besonderes Zielpublikum: die studentischen Jugendlichen der damaligen Zeit. Von Götz Alsmann.
1 - In a Little Book Shop - Dinah Shore - 19472 - For Whom the Bell Tolls - Dorsey Anderson with Tony Pastor and his Orchestra - 19413 - Farewell to Arms - Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra - 19374 - Nana - Clifford Wetterau with Joe Haymes and his Orchestra - 19345 - Conchita, Marquita, Lolita, Pepita, Rosita, Juanita Lopez - Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke, and The Modernaires with Glenn Miller and his Orchestra - 19426 - Paradise Lost - Ernie Andrews with the Wilbert Baranco Trio - 19457 - Francis the Talking Mule - Louis Prima and his Orchestra - 19508 - Call of the Wild - Arthur Pryor's Band (recorded in Montreal)9 - Jungle Blues - Ten Black Berries - 193010 - Mice and Men - The Glasgow Orpheus Choir, Sir Hugh Roberton, conductor - 194911 - I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book - Jimmy Durante - 195212 - Pamela de Cuba - René Delauney avec Jo Boyer et son orchestre - 13 - There's No Hiding Place Down Here - Hampton Institute Quartet - 194114 - Huckleberry Finn - Conway's Band - 191715 - Gone with the Wind - Larry Cotton with Horace Heidt and his Brigadiers - 193716 - In the Hall of the Mountain King (Edvard Grieg) - Will Bradley and his Orchestra - 1941
Features recordings by Ray Anthony, Stan Kenton, Tex Beneke and more. We learn a little bit about the show "Here's To Veterans". Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat. Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons. Artists are credited within the podcast.
Hardly forgotten but Frankie Laine certainly doesn't get the credit he deserve in the history of pop. An astonishing 75 year career. Singer, songwriter and actor. A big powerful voice that succeeded in all genres of music he tackled. Acknowledged as precursor to rock and roll. He happened to be a great guy too. Here he gives us- Some day, Love is such a cheat, The little boy and the old man( duet with Jimmy Boyd.) Your cheatin' heart and, of course, Blowing wild. Eartha Kitt starts us off with Cest si bon. Cherokee Canyon from Tex Beneke, Cherokee from Charlie Barnet. See what I did there. An artist that Frankie Laine admired as a young man was Gene Austin, falsetto crooner and songwriter. We hear him singing- I've grown so lonely thinking of you and then two interperations of Austin- Skilkret's Lonely Road. Jules Bledsoe sings the original song that was used in Showboat. Bledsoe was the first black singer/ actor to regularly appear on Broadway. He was the original Joe in Showboat. Mugsy Spanier takes the song, written in the style of an African, American folk song, and makes it a jazzy, blues classic. Big noise from Winnetka from Bob Haggart and Ray Baudec, two members of Bob Crosby's Bobcats. Legend has it they improvised its composition while the rest of the band were taking a break. A cool track, string bass, drums and whistling. Listen to Baudec play the lower part of the bass with his drum sticks. Marvellous stuff.
Features music by Andy Kirk, Duke Ellington and Tex Beneke. We also listen to a rockin' version of The Dipsy Doodle by Glenn Miller and learn a little about "Obligations". Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat. Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons. Artists are credited within the podcast.
We once again will reach into one of my favorite collections that my dad had. Not only because of the great big band music on it, but because of the album cover itself. So get ready to hear from a bandleader who has been called the father of modern military music from an album I used to trip over as a kid in Volume 94: Glenn Miller Collection Part 3. Credits and copyrights Glenn Miller And His Orchestra – Second Pressing Label: RCA Victor – LPT 6700 Series: Collector's Issue Series Format: 5 x Vinyl, LP, Compilation Country: Canada Released: 1956 Genre: Jazz Style: Big Band, Swing Rainbow Rhapsody Written-By – Benny Carter Little Brown Jug Written-By – Traditional Chip Off The Old Block Written-By – Al Young One O'clock Jump Written-By – Count Basie Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree Vocals – Dorothy Claire, Tex Beneke, The Modernaires Written-By – Charles Tobias, Lew Brown, Sam Stept The Hop Written-By – Ray Coniff I do not own the rights to this music. ASCAP, BMI licenses provided by third-party platforms for music that is not under Public Domain.
The biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway recorded for AFRS during the war years, The American Forces Network can trace its origins back to May 26, 1942, when the War Department established the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). The U.S. Army began broadcasting from London during World War II, using equipment and studio facilities borrowed from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The first transmission to U.S. troops began at 5:45 p.m. on July 4, 1943, and included less than five hours of recorded shows, a BBC news and sports broadcast. That day, Corporal Syl Binkin became the first U.S. Military broadcasters heard over the air. The signal was sent from London via telephone lines to five regional transmitters to reach U.S. troops in the United Kingdom as they prepared for the inevitable invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Fearing competition for civilian audiences the BBC initially tried to impose restrictions on AFN broadcasts within Britain (transmissions were only allowed from American Bases outside London and were limited to 50 watts of transmission power) and a minimum quota of British produced programming had to be carried. Nevertheless AFN programmes were widely enjoyed by the British civilian listeners who could receive them and once AFN operations transferred to continental Europe (shortly after D-Day) AFN were able to broadcast with little restriction with programmes available to civilian audiences across most of Europe (including Britain) after dark. As D-Day approached, the network joined with the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to develop programs especially for the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Mobile stations, complete with personnel, broadcasting equipment, and a record library were deployed to broadcast music and news to troops in the field. The mobile stations reported on front line activities and fed the news reports back to studio locations in London. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Entertainment Radio Stations Live 24/7 Sherlock Holmes/CBS Radio Mystery Theater https://live365.com/station/Sherlock-Holmes-Classic-Radio--a91441 https://live365.com/station/CBS-Radio-Mystery-Theater-a57491 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway recorded for AFRS during the war years, The American Forces Network can trace its origins back to May 26, 1942, when the War Department established the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). The U.S. Army began broadcasting from London during World War II, using equipment and studio facilities borrowed from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The first transmission to U.S. troops began at 5:45 p.m. on July 4, 1943, and included less than five hours of recorded shows, a BBC news and sports broadcast. That day, Corporal Syl Binkin became the first U.S. Military broadcasters heard over the air. The signal was sent from London via telephone lines to five regional transmitters to reach U.S. troops in the United Kingdom as they prepared for the inevitable invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Fearing competition for civilian audiences the BBC initially tried to impose restrictions on AFN broadcasts within Britain (transmissions were only allowed from American Bases outside London and were limited to 50 watts of transmission power) and a minimum quota of British produced programming had to be carried. Nevertheless AFN programmes were widely enjoyed by the British civilian listeners who could receive them and once AFN operations transferred to continental Europe (shortly after D-Day) AFN were able to broadcast with little restriction with programmes available to civilian audiences across most of Europe (including Britain) after dark. As D-Day approached, the network joined with the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to develop programs especially for the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Mobile stations, complete with personnel, broadcasting equipment, and a record library were deployed to broadcast music and news to troops in the field. The mobile stations reported on front line activities and fed the news reports back to studio locations in London. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Entertainment Radio Stations Live 24/7 Sherlock Holmes/CBS Radio Mystery Theater https://live365.com/station/Sherlock-Holmes-Classic-Radio--a91441 https://live365.com/station/CBS-Radio-Mystery-Theater-a57491 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Episode one hundred and forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, and the history of the theremin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "You're Gonna Miss Me" by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it, including the single version of "Good Vibrations". Oddly, the single version of "Good Vibrations" is not on the The Smile Sessions box set. But an entire CD of outtakes of the track is, and that was the source for the session excerpts here. Information on Lev Termen comes from Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky Transcript In ancient Greece, the god Hermes was a god of many things, as all the Greek gods were. Among those things, he was the god of diplomacy, he was a trickster god, a god of thieves, and he was a messenger god, who conveyed messages between realms. He was also a god of secret knowledge. In short, he was the kind of god who would have made a perfect spy. But he was also an inventor. In particular he was credited in Greek myth as having invented the lyre, an instrument somewhat similar to a guitar, harp, or zither, and as having used it to create beautiful sounds. But while Hermes the trickster god invented the lyre, in Greek myth it was a mortal man, Orpheus, who raised the instrument to perfection. Orpheus was a legendary figure, the greatest poet and musician of pre-Homeric Greece, and all sorts of things were attributed to him, some of which might even have been things that a real man of that name once did. He is credited with the "Orphic tripod" -- the classification of the elements into earth, water, and fire -- and with a collection of poems called the Rhapsodiae. The word Rhapsodiae comes from the Greek words rhaptein, meaning to stitch or sew, and ōidē, meaning song -- the word from which we get our word "ode", and originally a rhapsōdos was someone who "stitched songs together" -- a reciter of long epic poems composed of several shorter pieces that the rhapsōdos would weave into one continuous piece. It's from that that we get the English word "rhapsody", which in the sixteenth century, when it was introduced into the language, meant a literary work that was a disjointed collection of patchwork bits, stitched together without much thought as to structure, but which now means a piece of music in one movement, but which has several distinct sections. Those sections may seem unrelated, and the piece may have an improvisatory feel, but a closer look will usually reveal relationships between the sections, and the piece as a whole will have a sense of unity. When Orpheus' love, Eurydice, died, he went down into Hades, the underworld where the souls of the dead lived, and played music so beautiful, so profound and moving, that the gods agreed that Orpheus could bring the soul of his love back to the land of the living. But there was one condition -- all he had to do was keep looking forward until they were both back on Earth. If he turned around before both of them were back in the mortal realm, she would disappear forever, never to be recovered. But of course, as you all surely know, and would almost certainly have guessed even if you didn't know because you know how stories work, once Orpheus made it back to our world he turned around and looked, because he lost his nerve and didn't believe he had really achieved his goal. And Eurydice, just a few steps away from her freedom, vanished back into the underworld, this time forever. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop: "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Lev Sergeyevich Termen was born in St. Petersburg, in what was then the Russian Empire, on the fifteenth of August 1896, by the calendar in use in Russia at that time -- the Russian Empire was still using the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world, and in the Western world the same day was the twenty-seventh of August. Young Lev was fascinated both by science and the arts. He was trained as a cellist from an early age, but while he loved music, he found the process of playing the music cumbersome -- or so he would say later. He was always irritated by the fact that the instrument is a barrier between the idea in the musician's head and the sound -- that it requires training to play. As he would say later "I realised there was a gap between music itself and its mechanical production, and I wanted to unite both of them." Music was one of his big loves, but he was also very interested in physics, and was inspired by a lecture he saw from the physicist Abram Ioffe, who for the first time showed him that physics was about real, practical, things, about the movements of atoms and fields that really existed, not just about abstractions and ideals. When Termen went to university, he studied physics -- but he specifically wanted to be an experimental physicist, not a theoretician. He wanted to do stuff involving the real world. Of course, as someone who had the misfortune to be born in the late 1890s, Termen was the right age to be drafted when World War I started, but luckily for him the Russian Army desperately needed people with experience in the new invention that was radio, which was vital for wartime communications, and he spent the war in the Army radio engineering department, erecting radio transmitters and teaching other people how to erect them, rather than on the front lines, and he managed not only to get his degree in physics but also a diploma in music. But he was also becoming more and more of a Marxist sympathiser, even though he came from a relatively affluent background, and after the Russian Revolution he stayed in what was now the Red Army, at least for a time. Once Termen's Army service was over, he started working under Ioffe, working with him on practical applications of the audion, the first amplifying vacuum tube. The first one he found was that the natural capacitance of a human body when standing near a circuit can change the capacity of the circuit. He used that to create an invisible burglar alarm -- there was an antenna sending out radio waves, and if someone came within the transmitting field of the antenna, that would cause a switch to flip and a noise to be sounded. He was then asked to create a device for measuring the density of gases, outputting a different frequency for different densities. Because gas density can have lots of minor fluctuations because of air currents and so forth, he built a circuit that would cut out all the many harmonics from the audions he was using and give just the main frequency as a single pure tone, which he could listen to with headphones. That way, slight changes in density would show up as a slight change in the tone he heard. But he noticed that again when he moved near the circuit, that changed the capacitance of the circuit and changed the tone he was hearing. He started moving his hand around near the circuit and getting different tones. The closer his hand got to the capacitor, the higher the note sounded. And if he shook his hand a little, he could get a vibrato, just like when he shook his hand while playing the cello. He got Ioffe to come and listen to him, and Ioffe said "That's an electronic Orpheus' lament!" [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Termen figured out how to play Massenet's "Elegy" and Saint-Saens' "The Swan" using this system. Soon the students were all fascinated, telling each other "Termen plays Gluck on a voltmeter!" He soon figured out various refinements -- by combining two circuits, using the heterodyne principle, he could allow for far finer control. He added a second antenna, for volume control, to be used by the left hand -- the right hand would choose the notes, while the left hand would change the volume, meaning the instrument could be played without touching it at all. He called the instrument the "etherphone", but other people started calling it the termenvox -- "Termen's voice". Termen's instrument was an immediate sensation, as was his automatic burglar alarm, and he was invited to demonstrate both of them to Lenin. Lenin was very impressed by Termen -- he wrote to Trotsky later talking about Termen's inventions, and how the automatic burglar alarm might reduce the number of guards needed to guard a perimeter. But he was also impressed by Termen's musical invention. Termen held his hands to play through the first half of a melody, before leaving the Russian leader to play the second half by himself -- apparently he made quite a good job of it. Because of Lenin's advocacy for his work, Termen was sent around the Soviet Union on a propaganda tour -- what was known as an "agitprop tour", in the familiar Soviet way of creating portmanteau words. In 1923 the first piece of music written specially for the instrument was performed by Termen himself with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Andrey Paschenko's Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra. The score for that was later lost, but has been reconstructed, and the piece was given a "second premiere" in 2020 [Excerpt: Andrey Paschenko, "Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra" ] But the musical instrument wasn't the only scientific innovation that Termen was working on. He thought he could reverse death itself, and bring the dead back to life. He was inspired in this by the way that dead organisms could be perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost. He thought that if he could only freeze a dead person in the permafrost, he could then revive them later -- basically the same idea as the later idea of cryogenics, although Termen seems to have thought from the accounts I've read that all it would take would be to freeze and then thaw them, and not to have considered the other things that would be necessary to bring them back to life. Termen made two attempts to actually do this, or at least made preliminary moves in that direction. The first came when his assistant, a twenty-year-old woman, died of pneumonia. Termen was heartbroken at the death of someone so young, who he'd liked a great deal, and was convinced that if he could just freeze her body for a while he could soon revive her. He talked with Ioffe about this -- Ioffe was friends with the girl's family -- and Ioffe told him that he thought that he was probably right and probably could revive her. But he also thought that it would be cruel to distress the girl's parents further by discussing it with them, and so Termen didn't get his chance to experiment. He was even keener on trying his technique shortly afterwards, when Lenin died. Termen was a fervent supporter of the Revolution, and thought Lenin was a great man whose leadership was still needed -- and he had contacts within the top echelons of the Kremlin. He got in touch with them as soon as he heard of Lenin's death, in an attempt to get the opportunity to cryopreserve his corpse and revive him. Sadly, by this time it was too late. Lenin's brain had been pickled, and so the opportunity to resurrect him as a zombie Lenin was denied forever. Termen was desperately interested in the idea of bringing people back from the dead, and he wanted to pursue it further with his lab, but he was also being pushed to give demonstrations of his music, as well as doing security work -- Ioffe, it turned out, was also working as a secret agent, making various research trips to Germany that were also intended to foment Communist revolution. For now, Termen was doing more normal security work -- his burglar alarms were being used to guard bank vaults and the like, but this was at the order of the security state. But while Termen was working on his burglar alarms and musical instruments and attempts to revive dead dictators, his main project was his doctoral work, which was on the TV. We've said before in this podcast that there's no first anything, and that goes just as much for inventions as it does for music. Most inventions build on work done by others, which builds on work done by others, and so there were a lot of people building prototype TVs at this point. In Britain we tend to say "the inventor of the TV" was John Logie Baird, but Baird was working at the same time as people like the American Charles Francis Jenkins and the Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi, all of them building on earlier work by people like Archibald Low. Termen's prototype TV, the first one in Russia, came slightly later than any of those people, but was created more or less independently, and was more advanced in several ways, with a bigger screen and better resolution. Shortly after Lenin's death, Termen was invited to demonstrate his invention to Stalin, who professed himself amazed at the "magic mirror". [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] Termen was sent off to tour Europe giving demonstrations of his inventions, particularly his musical instrument. It was on this trip that he started using the Romanisation "Leon Theremin", and this is how Western media invariably referred to him. Rather than transliterate the Cyrillic spelling of his birth name, he used the French spelling his Huguenot ancestors had used before they emigrated to Russia, and called himself Leo or Leon rather than Lev. He was known throughout his life by both names, but said to a journalist in 1928 "First of all, I am not Tair-uh-MEEN. I wrote my name with French letters for French pronunciation. I am Lev Sergeyevich Tair-MEN.". We will continue to call him Termen, partly because he expressed that mild preference (though again, he definitely went by both names through choice) but also to distinguish him from the instrument, because while his invention remained known in Russia as the termenvox, in the rest of the world it became known as the theremin. He performed at the Paris Opera, and the New York Times printed a review saying "Some musicians were extremely pessimistic about the possibilities of the device, because at times M. Theremin played lamentably out of tune. But the finest Stradivarius, in the hands of a tyro, can give forth frightful sounds. The fact that the inventor was able to perform certain pieces with absolute precision proves that there remains to be solved only questions of practice and technique." Termen also came to the UK, where he performed in front of an audience including George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Henry Wood and others. Arnold Bennett was astonished, but Bernard Shaw, who had very strong opinions about music, as anyone who has read his criticism will be aware, compared the sound unfavourably to that of a comb and paper. After performing in Europe, Termen made his way to the US, to continue his work of performance, propagandising for the Soviet Revolution, and trying to license the patents for his inventions, to bring money both to him and to the Soviet state. He entered the US on a six-month visitor's visa, but stayed there for eleven years, renewing the visa every six months. His initial tour was a success, though at least one open-air concert had to be cancelled because, as the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker put it, "the weather on Saturday took such a counter-revolutionary turn". Nicolas Slonimsky, the musicologist we've encountered several times before, and who would become part of Termen's circle in the US, reviewed one of the performances, and described the peculiar audiences that Termen was getting -- "a considerable crop of ladies and gentlemen engaged in earnest exploration of the Great Beyond...the mental processes peculiar to believers in cosmic vibrations imparted a beatific look to some of the listeners. Boston is a seat of scientific religion; before he knows it Professor Theremin may be proclaimed Krishnamurti and sanctified as a new deity". Termen licensed his patents on the invention to RCA, who in 1929 started mass-producing the first ever theremins for general use. Termen also started working with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, including developing a new kind of theremin for Stokowski's orchestra to use, one with a fingerboard played like a cello. Stokowski said "I believe we shall have orchestras of these electric instruments. Thus will begin a new era in music history, just as modern materials and methods of construction have produced a new era of architecture." Possibly of more interest to the wider public, Lennington Sherwell, the son of an RCA salesman, took up the theremin professionally, and joined the band of Rudy Vallee, one of the most popular singers of the period. Vallee was someone who constantly experimented with new sounds, and has for example been named as the first band leader to use an electric banjo, and Vallee liked the sound of the theremin so much he ordered a custom-built left-handed one for himself. Sherwell stayed in Vallee's band for quite a while, and performed with him on the radio and in recording sessions, but it's very difficult to hear him in any of the recordings -- the recording equipment in use in 1930 was very primitive, and Vallee had a very big band with a lot of string and horn players, and his arrangements tended to have lots of instruments playing in unison rather than playing individual lines that are easy to differentiate. On top of that, the fashion at the time when playing the instrument was to try and have it sound as much like other instruments as possible -- to duplicate the sound of a cello or violin or clarinet, rather than to lean in to the instrument's own idiosyncracies. I *think* though that I can hear Sherwell's playing in the instrumental break of Vallee's big hit "You're Driving Me Crazy" -- certainly it was recorded at the time that Sherwell was in the band, and there's an instrument in there with a very pure tone, but quite a lot of vibrato, in the mid range, that seems only to be playing in the break and not the rest of the song. I'm not saying this is *definitely* a theremin solo on one of the biggest hits of 1930, but I'm not saying it's not, either: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "You're Driving Me Crazy" ] Termen also invented a light show to go along with his instrument -- the illumovox, which had a light shining through a strip of gelatin of different colours, which would be rotated depending on the pitch of the theremin, so that lower notes would cause the light to shine a deep red, while the highest notes would make it shine a light blue, with different shades in between. By 1930, though, Termen's fortunes had started to turn slightly. Stokowski kept using theremins in the orchestra for a while, especially the fingerboard models to reinforce the bass, but they caused problems. As Slonimsky said "The infrasonic vibrations were so powerful...that they hit the stomach physically, causing near-nausea in the double-bass section of the orchestra". Fairly soon, the Theremin was overtaken by other instruments, like the ondes martenot, an instrument very similar to the theremin but with more precise control, and with a wider range of available timbres. And in 1931, RCA was sued by another company for patent infringement with regard to the Theremin -- the De Forest Radio Company had patents around the use of vacuum tubes in music, and they claimed damages of six thousand dollars, plus RCA had to stop making theremins. Since at the time, RCA had only made an initial batch of five hundred instruments total, and had sold 485 of them, many of them as promotional loss-leaders for future batches, they had actually made a loss of three hundred dollars even before the six thousand dollar damages, and decided not to renew their option on Termen's patents. But Termen was still working on his musical ideas. Slonimsky also introduced Termen to the avant-garde composer and theosophist Henry Cowell, who was interested in experimental sounds, and used to do things like play the strings inside the piano to get a different tone: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell was part of a circle of composers and musicologists that included Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, and Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, who Cowell would introduce to each other. Crawford would later marry Seeger, and they would have several children together, including the folk singer Peggy Seeger, and Crawford would also adopt Seeger's son Pete. Cowell and Termen would together invent the rhythmicon, the first ever drum machine, though the rhythmicon could play notes as well as rhythms. Only two rhythmicons were made while Termen was in the US. The first was owned by Cowell. The second, improved, model was bought by Charles Ives, but bought as a gift for Cowell and Slonimsky to use in their compositions. Sadly, both rhythmicons eventually broke down, and no recording of either is known to exist. Termen started to get further and further into debt, especially as the Great Depression started to hit, and he also had a personal loss -- he'd been training a student and had fallen in love with her, although he was married. But when she married herself, he cut off all ties with her, though Clara Rockmore would become one of the few people to use the instrument seriously and become a real virtuoso on it. He moved into other fields, all loosely based around the same basic ideas of detecting someone's distance from an object. He built electronic gun detectors for Alcatraz and Sing-Sing prisons, and he came up with an altimeter for aeroplanes. There was also a "magic mirror" -- glass that appeared like a mirror until it was backlit, at which point it became transparent. This was put into shop windows along with a proximity detector -- every time someone stepped close to look at their reflection, the reflection would disappear and be replaced with the objects behind the mirror. He was also by this point having to spy for the USSR on a more regular basis. Every week he would meet up in a cafe with two diplomats from the Russian embassy, who would order him to drink several shots of vodka -- the idea was that they would loosen his inhibitions enough that he would not be able to hide things from them -- before he related various bits of industrial espionage he'd done for them. Having inventions of his own meant he was able to talk with engineers in the aerospace industry and get all sorts of bits of information that would otherwise not have been available, and he fed this back to Moscow. He eventually divorced his first wife, and remarried -- a Black American dancer many years his junior named Lavinia Williams, who would be the great love of his life. This caused some scandal in his social circle, more because of her race than the age gap. But by 1938 he had to leave the US. He'd been there on a six-month visa, which had been renewed every six months for more than a decade, and he'd also not been paying income tax and was massively in debt. He smuggled himself back to the USSR, but his wife was, at the last minute, not allowed on to the ship with him. He'd had to make the arrangements in secret, and hadn't even told her of the plans, so the first she knew was when he disappeared. He would later claim that the Soviets had told him she would be sent for two weeks later, but she had no knowledge of any of this. For decades, Lavinia would not even know if her husband was dead or alive. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] When Termen got back to the USSR, he found it had changed beyond recognition. Stalin's reign of terror was now well underway, and not only could he not find a job, most of the people who he'd been in contact with at the top of the Kremlin had been purged. Termen was himself arrested and tortured into signing a false confession to counter-revolutionary activities and membership of fascist organisations. He was sentenced to eight years in a forced labour camp, which in reality was a death sentence -- it was expected that workers there would work themselves to death on starvation rations long before their sentences were up -- but relatively quickly he was transferred to a special prison where people with experience of aeronautical design were working. He was still a prisoner, but in conditions not too far removed from normal civilian life, and allowed to do scientific and technical work with some of the greatest experts in the field -- almost all of whom had also been arrested in one purge or another. One of the pieces of work Termen did was at the direct order of Laventy Beria, Stalin's right-hand man and the architect of most of the terrors of the Stalinist regime. In Spring 1945, while the USA and USSR were still supposed to be allies in World War II, Beria wanted to bug the residence of the US ambassador, and got Termen to design a bug that would get past all the normal screenings. The bug that Termen designed was entirely passive and unpowered -- it did nothing unless a microwave beam of a precise frequency was beamed at it, and only then did it start transmitting. It was placed in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, presented to the ambassador by a troupe of scouts as a gesture of friendship between the two countries. The wood in the eagle's beak was thin enough to let the sound through. It remained there for seven years, through the tenures of four ambassadors, only being unmasked when a British radio operator accidentally tuned to the frequency it was transmitting on and was horrified to hear secret diplomatic conversations. Upon its discovery, the US couldn't figure out how it worked, and eventually shared the information with MI5, who took eighteen months to reverse-engineer Termen's bug and come up with their own, which remained the standard bug in use for about a decade. The CIA's own attempts to reverse-engineer it failed altogether. It was also Termen who came up with that well-known bit of spycraft -- focussing an infra-red beam on a window pane, to use it to pick up the sound of conversations happening in the room behind it. Beria was so pleased with Termen's inventions that he got Termen to start bugging Stalin himself, so Beria would be able to keep track of Stalin's whims. Termen performed such great services for Beria that Beria actually allowed him to go free not long after his sentence was served. Not only that, but Beria nominated Termen for the Stalin Award, Class II, for his espionage work -- and Stalin, not realising that Termen had been bugging *him* as well as foreign powers, actually upgraded that to a Class I, the highest honour the Soviet state gave. While Termen was free, he found himself at a loose end, and ended up volunteering to work for the organisation he had been working for -- which went by many names but became known as the KGB from the 1950s onwards. He tried to persuade the government to let Lavinia, who he hadn't seen in eight years, come over and join him, but they wouldn't even allow him to contact her, and he eventually remarried. Meanwhile, after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested for his crimes, and charged under the same law that he had had Termen convicted under. Beria wasn't as lucky as Termen, though, and was executed. By 1964, Termen had had enough of the KGB, because they wanted him to investigate obvious pseudoscience -- they wanted him to look into aliens, UFOs, ESP... and telepathy. [Excerpt, The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (early version)" "She's already working on my brain"] He quit and went back to civilian life. He started working in the acoustics lab in Moscow Conservatory, although he had to start at the bottom because everything he'd been doing for more than a quarter of a century was classified. He also wrote a short book on electronic music. In the late sixties an article on him was published in the US -- the first sign any of his old friends had that he'd not died nearly thirty years earlier. They started corresponding with him, and he became a minor celebrity again, but this was disapproved of by the Soviet government -- electronic music was still considered bourgeois decadence and not suitable for the Soviet Union, and all his instruments were smashed and he was sacked from the conservatory. He continued working in various technical jobs until the 1980s, and still continued inventing refinements of the theremin, although he never had any official support for his work. In the eighties, a writer tried to get him some sort of official recognition -- the Stalin Prize was secret -- and the university at which he was working sent a reply saying, in part, "L.S. Termen took part in research conducted by the department as an ordinary worker and he did not show enough creative activity, nor does he have any achievements on the basis of which he could be recommended for a Government decoration." By this time he was living in shared accommodation with a bunch of other people, one room to himself and using a shared bathroom, kitchen, and so on. After Glasnost he did some interviews and was asked about this, and said "I never wanted to make demands and don't want to now. I phoned the housing department about three months ago and inquired about my turn to have a new flat. The woman told me that my turn would come in five or six years. Not a very reassuring answer if one is ninety-two years old." In 1989 he was finally allowed out of the USSR again, for the first time in fifty-one years, to attend a UNESCO sponsored symposium on electronic music. Among other things, he was given, forty-eight years late, a letter that his old colleague Edgard Varese had sent about his composition Ecuatorial, which had originally been written for theremin. Varese had wanted to revise the work, and had wanted to get modified theremins that could do what he wanted, and had asked the inventor for help, but the letter had been suppressed by the Soviet government. When he got no reply, Varese had switched to using ondes martenot instead. [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] In the 1970s, after the death of his third wife, Termen had started an occasional correspondence with his second wife, Lavinia, the one who had not been able to come with him to the USSR and hadn't known if he was alive for so many decades. She was now a prominent activist in Haiti, having established dance schools in many Caribbean countries, and Termen still held out hope that they could be reunited, even writing her a letter in 1988 proposing remarriage. But sadly, less than a month after Termen's first trip outside the USSR, she died -- officially of a heart attack or food poisoning, but there's a strong suspicion that she was murdered by the military dictatorship for her closeness to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pro-democracy activist who later became President of Haiti. Termen was finally allowed to join the Communist Party in the spring of 1991, just before the USSR finally dissolved -- he'd been forbidden up to that point because of his conviction for counter-revolutionary crimes. He was asked by a Western friend why he'd done that when everyone else was trying to *leave* the Communist Party, and he explained that he'd made a promise to Lenin. In his final years he was researching immortality, going back to the work he had done in his youth, working with biologists, trying to find a way to restore elderly bodies to youthful vigour. But sadly he died in 1993, aged ninety-seven, before he achieved his goal. On one of his last trips outside the USSR, in 1991, he visited the US, and in California he finally got to hear the song that most people associate with his invention, even though it didn't actually feature a theremin: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Back in the 1930s, when he was working with Slonimsky and Varese and Ives and the rest, Termen had set up the Theremin Studio, a sort of experimental arts lab, and in 1931 he had invited the musicologist, composer, and theoretician Joseph Schillinger to become a lecturer there. Schillinger had been one of the first composers to be really interested in the theremin, and had composed a very early piece written specifically for the instrument, the First Airphonic Suite: [Excerpt: Joseph Schillinger, "First Airphonic Suite"] But he was most influential as a theoretician. Schillinger believed that all of the arts were susceptible to rigorous mathematical analysis, and that you could use that analysis to generate new art according to mathematical principles, art that would be perfect. Schillinger planned to work with Termen to try to invent a machine that could compose, perform, and transmit music. The idea was that someone would be able to tune in a radio and listen to a piece of music in real time as it was being algorithmically composed and transmitted. The two men never achieved this, but Schillinger became very, very, respected as someone with a rigorous theory of musical structure -- though reading his magnum opus, the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, is frankly like wading through treacle. I'll read a short excerpt just to give an idea of his thinking: "On the receiving end, phasic stimuli produced by instruments encounter a metamorphic auditory integrator. This integrator represents the auditory apparatus as a whole and is a complex interdependent system. It consists of two receivers (ears), transmitters, auditory nerves, and a transformer, the auditory braincenter. The response to a stimulus is integrated both quantitatively and selectively. The neuronic energy of response becomes the psychonic energy of auditory image. The response to stimuli and the process of integration are functional operations and, as such, can be described in mathematical terms , i.e., as synchronization, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. But these integrative processes alone do not constitute the material of orchestration either. The auditory image, whether resulting from phasic stimuli of an excitor or from selfstimulation of the auditory brain-center, can be described only in Psychological terms, of loudness, pitch, quality, etc. This leads us to the conclusion that the material of orchestration can be defined only as a group of conditions under which an integrated image results from a sonic stimulus subjected to an auditory response. This constitutes an interdependent tripartite system, in which the existence of one component necessitates the existence of two others. The composer can imagine an integrated sonic form, yet he cannot transmit it to the auditor (unless telepathicaliy) without sonic stimulus and hearing apparatus." That's Schillinger's way of saying that if a composer wants someone to hear the music they've written, the composer needs a musical instrument and the listener needs ears and a brain. This kind of revolutionary insight made Schillinger immensely sought after in the early 1930s, and among his pupils were the swing bandleaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and the songwriter George Gershwin, who turned to Schillinger for advice when he was writing his opera Porgy and Bess: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Here Come De Honey Man"] Another of his pupils was the trombonist and arranger Glenn Miller, who at that time was a session player working in pickup studio bands for people like Red Nichols. Miller spent some time studying with him in the early thirties, and applied those lessons when given the job of putting together arrangements for Ray Noble, his first prominent job. In 1938 Glenn Miller walked into a strip joint to see a nineteen-year-old he'd been told to take a look at. This was another trombonist, Paul Tanner, who was at the time working as a backing musician for the strippers. Miller had recently broken up his first big band, after a complete lack of success, and was looking to put together a new big band, to play arrangements in the style he had worked out while working for Noble. As Tanner later put it "he said, `Well, how soon can you come with me?' I said, `I can come right now.' I told him I was all packed, I had my toothbrush in my pocket and everything. And so I went with him that night, and I stayed with him until he broke the band up in September 1942." The new band spent a few months playing the kind of gigs that an unknown band can get, but they soon had a massive success with a song Miller had originally written as an arranging exercise set for him by Schillinger, a song that started out under the title "Miller's Tune", but soon became known worldwide as "Moonlight Serenade": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Moonlight Serenade"] The Miller band had a lot of lineup changes in the four and a bit years it was together, but other than Miller himself there were only four members who were with that group throughout its career, from the early dates opening for Freddie Fisher and His Schnickelfritzers right through to its end as the most popular band in America. They were piano player Chummy MacGregor, clarinet player Wilbur Schwartz, tenor sax player Tex Beneke, and Tanner. They played on all of Miller's big hits, like "In the Mood" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Chattanooga Choo-Choo"] But in September 1942, the band broke up as the members entered the armed forces, and Tanner found himself in the Army while Miller was in the Air Force, so while both played in military bands, they weren't playing together, and Miller disappeared over the Channel, presumed dead, in 1944. Tanner became a session trombonist, based in LA, and in 1958 he found himself on a session for a film soundtrack with Dr. Samuel Hoffman. I haven't been able to discover for sure which film this was for, but the only film on which Hoffman has an IMDB credit for that year is that American International Pictures classic, Earth Vs The Spider: [Excerpt: Earth Vs The Spider trailer] Hoffman was a chiropodist, and that was how he made most of his living, but as a teenager in the 1930s he had been a professional violin player under the name Hal Hope. One of the bands he played in was led by a man named Jolly Coburn, who had seen Rudy Vallee's band with their theremin and decided to take it up himself. Hoffman had then also got a theremin, and started his own all-electronic trio, with a Hammond organ player, and with a cello-style fingerboard theremin played by William Schuman, the future Pulitzer Prize winning composer. By the 1940s, Hoffman was a full-time doctor, but he'd retained his Musicians' Union card just in case the odd gig came along, and then in 1945 he received a call from Miklos Rozsa, who was working on the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's new film, Spellbound. Rozsa had tried to get Clara Rockmore, the one true virtuoso on the theremin playing at the time, to play on the soundtrack, but she'd refused -- she didn't do film soundtrack work, because in her experience they only wanted her to play on films about ghosts or aliens, and she thought it damaged the dignity of the instrument. Rozsa turned to the American Federation of Musicians, who as it turned out had precisely one theremin player who could read music and wasn't called Clara Rockmore on their books. So Dr. Samuel Hoffman, chiropodist, suddenly found himself playing on one of the most highly regarded soundtracks of one of the most successful films of the forties: [Excerpt: Miklos Rozsa, "Spellbound"] Rozsa soon asked Hoffman to play on another soundtrack, for the Billy Wilder film The Lost Weekend, another of the great classics of late forties cinema. Both films' soundtracks were nominated for the Oscar, and Spellbound's won, and Hoffman soon found himself in demand as a session player. Hoffman didn't have any of Rockmore's qualms about playing on science fiction and horror films, and anyone with any love of the genre will have heard his playing on genre classics like The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T, The Thing From Another World, It Came From Outer Space, and of course Bernard Hermann's score for The Day The Earth Stood Still: [Excerpt: The Day The Earth Stood Still score] As well as on such less-than-classics as The Devil's Weed, Voodoo Island, The Mad Magician, and of course Billy The Kid Vs Dracula. Hoffman became something of a celebrity, and also recorded several albums of lounge music with a band led by Les Baxter, like the massive hit Music Out Of The Moon, featuring tracks like “Lunar Rhapsody”: [Excerpt: Samuel Hoffman, "Lunar Rhapsody”] [Excerpt: Neil Armstrong] That voice you heard there was Neil Armstrong, on Apollo 11 on its way back from the moon. He took a tape of Hoffman's album with him. But while Hoffman was something of a celebrity in the fifties, the work dried up almost overnight in 1958 when he worked at that session with Paul Tanner. The theremin is a very difficult instrument to play, and while Hoffman was a good player, he wasn't a great one -- he was getting the work because he was the best in a very small pool of players, not because he was objectively the best there could be. Tanner noticed that Hoffman was having quite some difficulty getting the pitching right in the session, and realised that the theremin must be a very difficult instrument to play because it had no markings at all. So he decided to build an instrument that had the same sound, but that was more sensibly controlled than just waving your hands near it. He built his own invention, the electrotheremin, in less than a week, despite never before having had any experience in electrical engineering. He built it using an oscillator, a length of piano wire and a contact switch that could be slid up and down the wire, changing the pitch. Two days after he finished building it, he was in the studio, cutting his own equivalent of Hoffman's forties albums, Music For Heavenly Bodies, including a new exotica version of "Moonlight Serenade", the song that Glenn Miller had written decades earlier as an exercise for Schillinger: [Excerpt: Paul Tanner, "Moonlight Serenade"] Not only could the electrotheremin let the player control the pitch more accurately, but it could also do staccato notes easily -- something that's almost impossible with an actual theremin. And, on top of that, Tanner was cheaper than Hoffman. An instrumentalist hired to play two instruments is paid extra, but not as much extra as paying for another musician to come to the session, and since Tanner was a first-call trombone player who was likely to be at the session *anyway*, you might as well hire him if you want a theremin sound, rather than paying for Hoffman. Tanner was an excellent musician -- he was a professor of music at UCLA as well as being a session player, and he authored one of the standard textbooks on jazz -- and soon he had cornered the market, leaving Hoffman with only the occasional gig. We will actually be seeing Hoffman again, playing on a session for an artist we're going to look at in a couple of months, but in LA in the early sixties, if you wanted a theremin sound, you didn't hire a theremin player, you hired Paul Tanner to play his electrotheremin -- though the instrument was so obscure that many people didn't realise he wasn't actually playing a theremin. Certainly Brian Wilson seems to have thought he was when he hired him for "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] We talked briefly about that track back in the episode on "God Only Knows", but three days after recording that, Tanner was called back into the studio for another session on which Brian Wilson wanted a theremin sound. This was a song titled "Good, Good, Good Vibrations", and it was inspired by a conversation he'd had with his mother as a child. He'd asked her why dogs bark at some people and not at others, and she'd said that dogs could sense vibrations that people sent out, and some people had bad vibrations and some had good ones. It's possible that this came back to mind as he was planning the Pet Sounds album, which of course ends with the sound of his own dogs barking. It's also possible that he was thinking more generally about ideas like telepathy -- he had been starting to experiment with acid by this point, and was hanging around with a crowd of people who were proto-hippies, and reading up on a lot of the mystical ideas that were shared by those people. As we saw in the last episode, there was a huge crossover between people who were being influenced by drugs, people who were interested in Eastern religion, and people who were interested in what we now might think of as pseudo-science but at the time seemed to have a reasonable amount of validity, things like telepathy and remote viewing. Wilson had also had exposure from an early age to people claiming psychic powers. Jo Ann Marks, the Wilson family's neighbour and the mother of former Beach Boy David Marks, later had something of a minor career as a psychic to the stars (at least according to obituaries posted by her son) and she would often talk about being able to sense "vibrations". The record Wilson started out making in February 1966 with the Wrecking Crew was intended as an R&B single, and was also intended to sound *strange*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] At this stage, the song he was working on was a very straightforward verse-chorus structure, and it was going to be an altogether conventional pop song. The verses -- which actually ended up used in the final single, are dominated by organ and Ray Pohlman's bass: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] These bear a strong resemblance to the verses of "Here Today", on the Pet Sounds album which the Beach Boys were still in the middle of making: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Here Today (instrumental)"] But the chorus had far more of an R&B feel than anything the Beach Boys had done before: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] It did, though, have precedent. The origins of the chorus feel come from "Can I Get a Witness?", a Holland-Dozier-Holland song that had been a hit for Marvin Gaye in 1963: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Can I Get a Witness?"] The Beach Boys had picked up on that, and also on its similarity to the feel of Lonnie Mack's instrumental cover version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee", which, retitled "Memphis", had also been a hit in 1963, and in 1964 they recorded an instrumental which they called "Memphis Beach" while they were recording it but later retitled "Carl's Big Chance", which was credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but was basically just playing the "Can I Get a Witness" riff over twelve-bar blues changes, with Carl doing some surf guitar over the top: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Carl's Big Chance"] The "Can I Get a Witness" feel had quickly become a standard piece of the musical toolkit – you might notice the resemblance between that riff and the “talking 'bout my generation” backing vocals on “My Generation” by the Who, for example. It was also used on "The Boy From New York City", a hit on Red Bird Records by the Ad-Libs: [Excerpt: The Ad-Libs, "The Boy From New York City"] The Beach Boys had definitely been aware of that record -- on their 1965 album Summer Days... And Summer Nights! they recorded an answer song to it, "The Girl From New York City": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Girl From New York City"] And you can see how influenced Brian was by the Ad-Libs record by laying the early instrumental takes of the "Good Vibrations" chorus from this February session under the vocal intro of "The Boy From New York City". It's not a perfect match, but you can definitely hear that there's an influence there: [Excerpt: "The Boy From New York City"/"Good Vibrations"] A few days later, Brian had Carl Wilson overdub some extra bass, got a musician in to do a jaw harp overdub, and they also did a guide vocal, which I've sometimes seen credited to Brian and sometimes Carl, and can hear as both of them depending on what I'm listening for. This guide vocal used a set of placeholder lyrics written by Brian's collaborator Tony Asher, which weren't intended to be a final lyric: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (first version)"] Brian then put the track away for a month, while he continued work on the Pet Sounds album. At this point, as best we can gather, he was thinking of it as something of a failed experiment. In the first of the two autobiographies credited to Brian (one whose authenticity is dubious, as it was largely put together by a ghostwriter and Brian later said he'd never even read it) he talks about how he was actually planning to give the song to Wilson Pickett rather than keep it for the Beach Boys, and one can definitely imagine a Wilson Pickett version of the song as it was at this point. But Brian's friend Danny Hutton, at that time still a minor session singer who had not yet gone on to form the group that would become Three Dog Night, asked Brian if *he* could have the song if Brian wasn't going to use it. And this seems to have spurred Brian into rethinking the whole song. And in doing so he was inspired by his very first ever musical memory. Brian has talked a lot about how the first record he remembers hearing was when he was two years old, at his maternal grandmother's house, where he heard the Glenn Miller version of "Rhapsody in Blue", a three-minute cut-down version of Gershwin's masterpiece, on which Paul Tanner had of course coincidentally played: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] Hearing that music, which Brian's mother also played for him a lot as a child, was one of the most profoundly moving experiences of Brian's young life, and "Rhapsody in Blue" has become one of those touchstone pieces that he returns to again and again. He has recorded studio versions of it twice, in the mid-nineties with Van Dyke Parks: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, "Rhapsody in Blue"] and in 2010 with his solo band, as the intro and outro of an album of Gershwin covers: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Rhapsody in Blue"] You'll also often see clips of him playing "Rhapsody in Blue" when sat at the piano -- it's one of his go-to songs. So he decided he was going to come up with a song that was structured like "Rhapsody in Blue" -- what publicist Derek Taylor would later describe as a "pocket symphony", but "pocket rhapsody" would possibly be a better term for it. It was going to be one continuous song, but in different sections that would have different instrumentation and different feelings to them -- he'd even record them in different studios to get different sounds for them, though he would still often have the musicians run through the whole song in each studio. He would mix and match the sections in the edit. His second attempt to record the whole track, at the start of April, gave a sign of what he was attempting, though he would not end up using any of the material from this session: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-04-09" around 02:34] Nearly a month later, on the fourth of May, he was back in the studio -- this time in Western Studios rather than Gold Star where the previous sessions had been held, with yet another selection of musicians from the Wrecking Crew, plus Tanner, to record another version. This time, part of the session was used for the bridge for the eventual single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-04 Second Chorus and Fade"] On the twenty-fourth of May the Wrecking Crew, with Carl Wilson on Fender bass (while Lyle Ritz continued to play string bass, and Carol Kaye, who didn't end up on the finished record at all, but who was on many of the unused sessions, played Danelectro), had another attempt at the track, this time in Sunset Studios: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 1966-05-24 (Parts 2&3)"] Three days later, another group of musicians, with Carl now switched to rhythm guitar, were back in Western Studios recording this: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-27 Part C" from 2:52] The fade from that session was used in the final track. A few days later they were in the studio again, a smaller group of people with Carl on guitar and Brian on piano, along with Don Randi on electric harpsichord, Bill Pitman on electric bass, Lyle Ritz on string bass and Hal Blaine on drums. This time there seems to have been another inspiration, though I've never heard it mentioned as an influence. In March, a band called The Association, who were friends with the Beach Boys, had released their single "Along Comes Mary", and by June it had become a big hit: [Excerpt: The Association, "Along Comes Mary"] Now the fuzz bass part they were using on the session on the second of June sounds to my ears very, very, like that intro: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (Inspiration) Western 1966-06-02" from 01:47] That session produced the basic track that was used for the choruses on the final single, onto which the electrotheremin was later overdubbed as Tanner wasn't at that session. Some time around this point, someone suggested to Brian that they should use a cello along with the electrotheremin in the choruses, playing triplets on the low notes. Brian has usually said that this was Carl's idea, while Brian's friend Van Dyke Parks has always said that he gave Brian the idea. Both seem quite certain of this, and neither has any reason to lie, so I suspect what might have happened is that Parks gave Brian the initial idea to have a cello on the track, while Carl in the studio suggested having it specifically play triplets. Either way, a cello part by Jesse Erlich was added to those choruses. There were more sessions in June, but everything from those sessions was scrapped. At some point around this time, Mike Love came up with a bass vocal lyric, which he sang along with the bass in the choruses in a group vocal session. On August the twenty-fourth, two months after what one would think at this point was the final instrumental session, a rough edit of the track was pulled together. By this point the chorus had altered quite a bit. It had originally just been eight bars of G-flat, four bars of B-flat, then four more bars of G-flat. But now Brian had decided to rework an idea he had used in "California Girls". In that song, each repetition of the line "I wish they all could be California" starts a tone lower than the one before. Here, after the bass hook line is repeated, everything moves up a step, repeats the line, and then moves up another step: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] But Brian was dissatisfied with this version of the track. The lyrics obviously still needed rewriting, but more than that, there was a section he thought needed totally rerecording -- this bit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] So on the first of September, six and a half months after the first instrumental session for the song, the final one took place. This had Dennis Wilson on organ, Tommy Morgan on harmonicas, Lyle Ritz on string bass, and Hal Blaine and Carl Wilson on percussion, and replaced that with a new, gentler, version: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations (Western 1966-09-01) [New Bridge]"] Well, that was almost the final instrumental session -- they called Paul Tanner in to a vocal overdub session to redo some of the electrotheremin parts, but that was basically it. Now all they had to do was do the final vocals. Oh, and they needed some proper lyrics. By this point Brian was no longer working with Tony Asher. He'd started working with Van Dyke Parks on some songs, but Parks wasn't interested in stepping into a track that had already been worked on so long, so Brian eventually turned to Mike Love, who'd already come up with the bass vocal hook, to write the lyrics. Love wrote them in the car, on the way to the studio, dictating them to his wife as he drove, and they're actually some of his best work. The first verse grounds everything in the sensory, in the earthy. He makes a song originally about *extra* -sensory perception into one about sensory perception -- the first verse covers sight, sound, and smell: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Carl Wilson was chosen to sing the lead vocal, but you'll notice a slight change in timbre on the line "I hear the sound of a" -- that's Brian stepping into double him on the high notes. Listen again: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] For the second verse, Love's lyric moves from the sensory grounding of the first verse to the extrasensory perception that the song has always been about, with the protagonist knowing things about the woman who's the object of the song without directly perceiving them. The record is one of those where I wish I was able to play the whole thing for you, because it's a masterpiece of structure, and of editing, and of dynamics. It's also a record that even now is impossible to replicate properly on stage, though both its writers in their live performances come very close. But while someone in the audience for either the current touring Beach Boys led by Mike Love or for Brian Wilson's solo shows might come away thinking "that sounded just like the record", both have radically different interpretations of it even while sticking close to the original arrangement. The touring Beach Boys' version is all throbbing strangeness, almost garage-rock, emphasising the psychedelia of the track: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live 2014)"] While Brian Wilson's live version is more meditative, emphasising the gentle aspects: [Excerpt Brian Wilson, "Good Vibrations (live at the Roxy)"] But back in 1966, there was definitely no way to reproduce it live with a five-person band. According to Tanner, they actually asked him if he would tour with them, but he refused -- his touring days were over, and also he felt he would look ridiculous, a middle-aged man on stage with a bunch of young rock and roll stars, though apparently they offered to buy him a wig so he wouldn't look so out of place. When he wouldn't tour with them, they asked him where they could get a theremin, and he pointed them in the direction of Robert Moog. Moog -- whose name is spelled M-o-o-g and often mispronounced "moog", had been a teenager in 1949, when he'd seen a schematic for a theremin in an electronic hobbyist magazine, after Samuel Hoffman had brought the instrument back into the limelight. He'd built his own, and started building others to sell to other hobbyists, and had also started branching out into other electronic instruments by the mid-sixties. His small company was the only one still manufacturing actual theremins, but when the Beach Boys came to him and asked him for one, they found it very difficult to control, and asked him if he could do anything simpler. He came up with a ribbon-controlled oscillator, on the same principle as Tanner's electro-theremin, but even simpler to operate, and the Beach Boys bought it and gave it to Mike Love to play on stage. All he had to do was run his finger up and down a metallic ribbon, with the positions of the notes marked on it, and it would come up with a good approximation of the electro-theremin sound. Love played this "woo-woo machine" as he referred to it, on stage for several years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live in Hawaii 8/26/67)"] Moog was at the time starting to build his first synthesisers, and having developed that ribbon-control mechanism he decided to include it in the early models as one of several different methods of controlling the Moog synthesiser, the instrument that became synonymous with the synthesiser in the late sixties and early seventies: [Excerpt: Gershon Kingsley and Leonid Hambro, "Rhapsody in Blue" from Switched-On Gershwin] "Good Vibrations" became the Beach Boys' biggest ever hit -- their third US number one, and their first to make number one in the UK. Brian Wilson had managed, with the help of his collaborators, to make something that combined avant-garde psychedelic music and catchy pop hooks, a truly experimental record that was also a genuine pop classic. To this day, it's often cited as the greatest single of all time. But Brian knew he could do better. He could be even more progressive. He could make an entire album using the same techniques as "Good Vibrations", one where themes could recur, where sections could be edited together and songs could be constructed in the edit. Instead of a pocket symphony, he could make a full-blown teenage symphony to God. All he had to do was to keep looking forward, believe he could achieve his goal, and whatever happened, not lose his nerve and turn back. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Smile Promo" ]
In this Podcast Extra of "The Big Band and Swing Podcast" we celebrate the birthday of vocalist, saxophonist and bandleader - Tex Beneke. Beneke was born on February 12, 1914 in Fort Worth, Texas. * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons. Artists are credited within the podcast.
Remote from Los Angeles with the Boyd Rayburn Orchestra. Buddy Morrow's band with Rosemary Clooney for The National Guard. Tex Beneke with the Glenn Miller Orchestra on CBS Radio.
Shellac Stack No. 252 walks with sweetness — and Sam Lanin! We hear from Radio Girl Vaughn De Leath, banjo master Harry Reser, and harp-zither player Mme. Kitty Berger. We also hear from the bands of Boyd Raeburn, Tex Beneke, Jack Payne, Tommy Gott, Nathan Glantz, and more.
Tex Beneke "The Blues Of The Record Man"Spencer Dickinson "Body (My Only Friend)"MC5 "Ramblin' Rose"Precious Bryant "The Truth"Eilen Jewell "One of Those Days"Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers "Bustin' Loose"Minutemen "I Felt Like a Gringo"Wanda Jackson "Riot in Cell Block Number 9"Waylon Jennings "Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me"Etta Baker "Carolina Breakdown"Bob Dylan "Fixin' to Die (mono version)"Bukka White "Streamline Special"Blind Lemon Jefferson "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"The White Stripes "The Nurse"Neko Case "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man"Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys "Ida Red"Chuck Berry "Havana Moon"Ella Fitzgerald "All Through The Night"Hartman's Heartbreakers "Please, Mr. Moon, Don't Tell on Me"The Ink Spots "Slap That Bass"Guitar Slim "The Things That I Used to Do"The Yardbirds "The Train Kept A-Rollin'"Muddy Waters "Hey Hey"Lucinda Williams "Crescent City"Fats Waller "You're Not the Only Oyster In the Stew"Palace Music "Work Hard / Play Hard"ZZ Top "Just Got Paid"Jason Isbell "Stockholm"Nina Nastasia "You Can Take Your Time"Faces "Miss Judy's Farm"Funkadelic "Friday Night, August 14th"Dr. John "Where Ya At Mule"Eric Clapton and Duane Allman "Mean Old World"Elmore James "Done Somebody Wrong"Blind Willie McTell "Statesboro Blues"Wilson Pickett "Hey Jude"The Allman Brothers Band "Dreams"Coleman Hawkins & his Orchestra "Body and Soul"Isaiah Owens "You Without Sin"Bettye LaVette "Just Say So"Bruce Springsteen "Incident on 57th Street"Drag The River "Fleeting Porch of Tide"Loretta Lynn "This Old House"Roger Miller "I Ain't Coming Home Tonight"Built to Spill "Ripple"
This is an audio track of the famous late night TV show. Steve talks about singer Tex BENEKE, and Hop Along Cassidy. After a break to play a few bars…
Sold American - first Glenn Miller Orchestra recordings . . these are early, almost prototype records made by Miller in 1937 and 1938 when he was "getting it together" - more jazz than later featuring Sterling Bose, Pee Wee Erwin, Johnny Austin, Irving Fazola, Hal McIntyre, Jerry Jerome, Tex Beneke and others. Also, three early live recordings of his early band. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support
Best tracks and stonking tunes from Tex Beneke, Frankie Froba, Teresa Brewer, Fats Waller, Anita O'Day, Lulu Zeigler, Lorrae Desmond, Lonnie Donegan, Les Paul, Mary Ford, Leslie Hutchinson, Sugar Chile Robinson, Jimmie Rodgers, Harry Torrani, Phyllis Robins, McCravy Brothers, Geoffrey Goodheart, Tiny Bradshaw, Bob Crosby, Marion Mann and Frankie Laine.
This is another of our salutes to the music and service that the Stage Door Canteens provided to military personnel during World War II. The Stage Door Canteen refers to the famous World War II-era Times Square social club for soldiers temporarily stationed in New York City awaiting deployment, usually to the war in Europe. It opened March 2, 1942, in a space underneath the 44th Street Theatre. The canteen was open seven nights a week and offered servicemen dancing, entertainment, food and nonalcoholic drinks, and even opportunities to rub shoulders with celebrities. And it all was FREE. The New York acting community did everything. They would perform songs, comedy, and short versions of the plays and musicals that were playing on Broadway. Actresses also served as hostesses and dancing partners. The New York Stage Door Canteen was immediately popular. The space was 40-by-80 feet and could accommodate 500 people, but it was filled to capacity from the start. Seven other canteens were later located in Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco and Newark and Los Angeles. In 1943 the success of New York’s Stage Door Canteen prompted a movie about the popular service men's center and featured stars of the big screen and popular Big Bands. One of the many praiseworthy qualities of the canteens was their credo. They were open to all servicemen of every Allied nation, and without any form of segregation. As the war dragged on, the popularity of the canteens never wavered. By November 1945, Stage Door Canteens were operating in eight US cities and London and Paris. Together, they entertained and fed 11 million Allied servicemen. The only canteen to rival the original’s fame was the Hollywood Canteen in Los Angeles, thanks to its proximity to the country’s biggest stars. Instead of theater people, movie stars and crew members did the work. Hollywood Canteen, the movie, was the fourth highest grossing film of 1944. Watch both movies. You’ll be entertained and hear some great music. If you ever visit the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, you’ll see a replica of the Stage Door Canteen. We hope you enjoy this music of the Stage Door Canteens. Please accept this as a tribute to the Greatest Generation. To all our service members past and present, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for your service. Enjoy. - - - Join the conversation on Facebook at - - - https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at - - - dannymemorylane@gmail.com - - - You’ll hear: 1) When Johnny Comes Marching Home by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) 2) Comin' In On A Wing And A Prayer by The Song Spinners [The only song with a war connection to appear in the top twenty best-selling songs of 1943 in the US] 3) I'll Get By (As Long As I Have You) by Harry James & His Orchestra (with Dick Haymes, vocal) [Reached #1 on the Juke Box chart on 6/10/44 - Lasted 6 wks] 4) They're Either Too Young or Too Old by Bette Davis [From Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), a film made as a World War II fundraiser, with the stars donated their salaries to the Hollywood Canteen, which was founded by John Garfield and Bette Davis] 5) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle by Kay Kyser & His Orchestra (with Julie Conway and Harry Babbitt & The Group, vocals) [A fan favorite from the Stage Door Canteen (1943) era] 6) Rosie The Riveter by Four Vagabonds [Rosie the Riveter was the star of a campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for defense industries during World War II] 7) She's a Bombshell from Brooklyn by Xavier Cugat [From the original film soundtrack of Stage Door Canteen (1943)] 8) Somebody Else Is Taking My Place by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra (with Peggy Lee, vocal) [Featured in the movie, Stage Door Canteen (1943)] 9) Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) [Featured in the movie, Stage Door Canteen (1943)] 10) Till The End Of Time by Perry Como [Spent 19 weeks on the Best Seller chart, 9 weeks at #1 and a million seller] 11) V-Day Stomp by The Four Clefs (Johnny Green, Adam Cato, Melvin Chapman, Jack Martin) [A World War II classic] 12) Saturday Night (Is The Loneliest Night In The Week) by Frank Sinatra [Featured in the movie, Stage Door Canteen (1943)] 13) Mairzy Doats by The Merry Macs [Reached #1 on the Juke Box chart on 3/18/44 - Lasted 5 weeks] 14) Don't Worry Island by Freddy Martin & His Orchestra [From the original film soundtrack of Stage Door Canteen (1943)] 15) Why Don't You Do Right? by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra (with Peggy Lee, vocal) [Featured in the 1943 film, Stage Door Canteen and sold 1 million records] 16) Corns for My Country by The Andrews Sisters [From the original film soundtrack of The Hollywood Canteen (1944)] 17) Now Is The Hour (Maori Farewell Song) by Bing Crosby (with The Ken Darby Choir, vocals) [Became known as Po Atarau and was used as a farewell to Māori (the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand) soldiers going to off War] 18) Katharine Hepburn’ advice. [A clip from the original film soundtrack of Stage Door Canteen (1943)] 19) We Mustn't Say Goodbye by Lanny Ross [From the original film soundtrack of Stage Door Canteen (1943)] 20) Goodnight, Sweetheart by Ray Noble & His Orchestra (with Snooky Lanson, vocal) [A best seller from the WWII era] 21) I Left My Heart At The Stage Door Canteen by Jan Garber & His Orchestra [From the Broadway All-Soldier Show "This Is The Army" (1942) written by Irving Berlin]
Hello everyone! I'm going to be taking a little break during the holidays but I DID NOT want to leave you empty handed. So I've put together a collection of songs from past episodes that I really enjoyed cleaning up and playing for you. The King Sisters, Tex Beneke and Count Basie are just a few of the artists you'll hear in this episode. Enjoy! ...and remember, if you want to listen to more Big Band and Swing Music check out SwingCityRadio.com to hear Your Big Band Favorites from the 1930's, 40's and Today! * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons. Artists are credited within the podcast.
From STUDIO 67 in Hollywood, it’s our BUDDIES LOUNGE HOLIDAY JUBILEE’s for 2020! Join the HO-HO-Host, the BIG W as he explores, with eggnog in hand, the Space-Age Pop Holiday Hi-Fi musical sounds of the 1950’s and the 1960’s in LIVING STEREO!! Playlist: • We Wish You The Merriest - Frank Sinatra • Happy Holiday - The Percy Faith Orchestra • That Holiday Feeling - Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé • Baby, It's Cold Outside - Ted Heath & Edmundo Ros • I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm - Dean Martin • Sun Valley Ski Run - Esquivel • Little Jack Frost, Get Lost - Bing Crosby & Peggy Lee • I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus - Ira Ironstrings • Kissin' By the Mistletoe - Aretha Franklin • Ding Dong Dandy Christmas - The Three Suns • It Happened In Sun Valley - Randy Van Horne Singers • Santa's Got A Brand New Bag - The Hollyridge Strings • There Is No Christmas Like a Home Christmas - Perry Como • Jingle Bells - Sammy Davis Jr. • Yulesville - Edd Byrnes • And The Bells Rang - Modernaires with Tex Beneke • My Favorite Things - Golddiggers • Christmas Alphabet - The McGuire Sisters • Nutcracker Suite - Les Brown • Joy - Glad Singers • Brazilian Sleigh Bells - Ferrante & Teicher • Here Comes Santa Claus - The Mills Brothers • Sleigh Ride - Al Caiola & Riz Ortolani • Warm December - Julie London • Christmas Tree - The Voices Of Walter Schumann • Frosty The Snowman - The Beach Boys • Dance, Mr. Snowman, Dance - The Crew Cuts • The Merriest - June Christy • The Christmas Song - Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 • It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year - Andy Williams • Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town - The Ventures • Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer - Wayne Newton • Toy Parade - Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra • Beautiful City - The New Christy Minstrels • Jingle Bell Rock - Bobby Vee • Good King Wenceslas - Stan Kenton • Go Tell It On the Mountain - Bobby Darin • Winter Wonderland - Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass • The Happiest Christmas Tree - Nat "King" Cole • Hallelujah - Harry Simeone
Years ago, the Make Believe Ballroom took you to the greatest ballrooms imaginable to listen [over the radio] to the great bands of the era. Come with us now as Danny Lane takes you “high above the dance floor” of the Suncoast Supper Club. It’s just like being there. Imagine four stages with continuous music and a dance floor that swings and sways. You’ll be under the stars and overlooking Sarasota Bay. **** On the main bandstand tonight the headliner is The Glenn Miller Orchestra. Also, over in the M’ Toto Lounge you’ll hear Patti Page, Sammy Davis Jr, and Lucy Ann Polk. **** Right this way, we’ve reserved a VIP table just for you. That's our virtual ballroom. Enjoy. **** On stage tonight are: 1) Let's Dance [Excerpt] by Benny Goodman & His Big Band 2) Bugle Call Rag by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Ray McKinley, drums) 3) 'Deed I Do by Bunny Berigan and His Orchestra (Kathy Lane, vocal) 4) 'Tain't What You Do (It's The Way That You Do It) by Chick Webb (Ella Fitzgerald, vocal) 5) How About You by Frank Sinatra 6) Imagination by Lucy Ann Polk 7) (I've Got A Gal In) Kalamazoo by Glenn Miller (with Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires) 8) Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 9) Ciribiribin by Pérez Prado & His Orchestra 10) They All Laughed by Patti Page 11) Red Bank Boogie by Count Basie Orchestra 12) American Patrol by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 13) My Romance by The Les Brown Orchestra 14) Out Of This World by Sammy Davis Jr. 15) St. Louis Blues March by Glenn Miller & The Army / Air Force Band 16) The G.I. Jive by Johnny Mercer 17) I'm Stepping Out With A Memory Tonight by The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra (with Helen O'Connell, vocal) 18) Jukebox Saturday Night by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Tex Beneke, Marion Hutton & The Modernaires) 19) In The Mood by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 20) Let's Dance [Excerpt] by Benny Goodman & His Big Band
Glenn Miller was the best-selling recording artist from 1939 to 1942, leading one of the best-known big bands. Miller's recordings include "In the Mood", "Moonlight Serenade", "Pennsylvania 6-5000", "Chattanooga Choo Choo", "A String of Pearls", "At Last", "(I've Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo", "American Patrol", "Tuxedo Junction", "Elmer's Tune", and "Little Brown Jug". In just four years Glenn Miller scored 16 number-one records and 69 top ten hits. In 1942, Miller volunteered to join the U.S. military to entertain troops during World War II, ending up with the U.S. Army Air Forces. On December 15, 1944, while flying to Paris, Miller's aircraft disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel. R.I.P. Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com You’ll hear: 1) American Patrol by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 2) Little Brown Jug by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 3) Elmer's Tune by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Ray Eberle & The Modernaires) 4) The Saint Louis Blues March by Captain Glenn Miller & The 418th Army Air Force Training Command Band" 5) People Like You And Me (from the 1943 film Orchestra Wives) by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with The Modernaires & Marion Hutton & Tex Beneke, vocals) 6) 7-0-5 by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra by The 418th Army Air Force Band under the direction of Sgt. Jerry Gray 7) When Johnny Comes Marching Home by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) 8) Tuxedo Junction by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 9) Chattanooga Choo Choo (From the film "Sun Valley Serenade") by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Tex Beneke, Paula Kelly & The Modernaires, vocals) 10) Bugle Call Rag by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Ray McKinley, drums) 11) Jukebox Saturday Night by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) 12) Ciribiribin by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Ray Eberle, vocal) 13) Boom Shot (from the 1943 film Orchestra Wives) by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 14) Make Believe Ballroom Time by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with The Modernaires, vocal) 15) A String Of Pearls by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Bobby Hackett, trumpet solo) 16) The G.I. Jive by Glenn Miller & The Army Air Force Band (with Ray McKinley & The Crew Chiefs, vocals) 17) Anchors Aweigh by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 18) Pennsylvania 6-5000 by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with vocals by the band) 19) Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 20) I've Got A Gal In Kalamazoo (From "Orchestra Wives") by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (with Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) 21) In The Mood [Reached #1 on February 10th 1940 & lasted 13 weeks at #1] by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra
Shellac Stack No. 205 yearns for love with Larry Lee's Orchestra and swings along with Joe Reichman We also hear from Ruth Etting, Nat Gonella, Claude Hopkins, Tex Beneke, Ben Pollack, Doc Evans' Band, Margaret Whiting — and even the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra! Lots of tuneful delights this time around. Support the Shellac Stack on … Continue reading »
Here's a two-hour Christmas music special just for you featuring not as often heard songs by Frankie Yankovic, Rend Collective, Guy Lombardo with the Andrews Sisters, Spike Jones, Cafe' Accordion Orchestra, Fogo Island Accordion Group, Dennis Polisky & The Maestro Men, Mark Greathouse, Craig Duncan, Stew & Marge Clayton, Riders in the Sky, The Robertsons, Everybody, Prague Madrigal Singers, Die Korntaler, Simmone Summerland with Karsten Gluck & Die Kling Froesch, Die Sternensingers St. Niklaus, Symphonium Music Box, Jimmy Sturr & His Orchestra, Squeezebox Hero, Alex Meixner, Dave Kline, Andrea Bocelli, The Lawrence Welk Orchestra & Singers, Myron Floren, Mitch Miller & Gang, Gene Autry, Tex Beneke, JD McPherson, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, The Chardon Polka Band, The Walt Groller Orchestra, and more. Peace on Earth!
"Swing dance" is a group of dances that developed with the swing style of jazz music in the 1920s-1950s, the origin of the dances predating popular "swing era" music. The most well-known of these dances is Lindy Hop, a fusion of jazz, tap, breakaway, and Charleston, which originated in Harlem in the early 1920s, but includes a number of other styles such as Balboa, Shag, West Coast Swing, and Boogie Woogie. “Sunday Swing” highlights the music of the swing era and the dances that thrived in the ballrooms and dance halls. Danny Lane guides you through a one hour swing session. Do the Lindy Hop or choose your favorite dance. Just keep swingin'. ***** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 ***** or by email at: dannymemorylane@gmail.com ***** You’ll hear: 1) Ding Dong Daddy Of The D-Car Line by Cherry Poppin' Daddies 2) Swingin' The Blues by Count Basie & His Orchestra 3) Tuxedo Junction by Debbie Curtis Radio Big Band 4) C Jam Blues by Duke Ellington 5) Saturday Night (Is The Loneliest Night In The Week) by Frank Sinatra 6) One O'Clock Jump by Red Bank Jazz Orchestra & Joe Muccioli 7) Frenesi by Eydie Gormé 8) Gene's Boogie by Gene Krupa 9) Let's Dance by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra 10) Ain't Misbehavin' by Louis Armstrong 11) Forty-Second Street by Somethin' Smith & The Redheads 12) For Dancers Only by Ray Anthony & His Orchestra 13) Trickle, Trickle by The Manhattan Transfer 14) Sepian Bounce by Jay McShann & His Orchestra (Charlie Parker, alto saxophone) 15) Tune Up by Junior Walker & The All Stars 16) One Of Them Good Ones by Buddy Johnson & His Band 17) A Gal in Calico by Tex Beneke and His Orchestra Playing the Music Made Famous by Glenn Miller (with Tex Beneke & The Crew Chiefs, vocals) 18) My Blue Heaven by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 19) Juke Box Baby by Perry Como 20) Black Bottom by Bunny Berigan 21) Manhattan Spiritual by The Reg Owen Orchestra
One hour of non-stop swing music. Danny Lane brings back memories of times at The Cotton Club. Swing music is back, in a big way. Dance like no one is watching. Keep swingin’. In this episode you’ll hear: 1) Sing Me A Swing Song by Chick Webb & Ella Fitzgerald 2) You Never Know How You Look by Les Brown & His Orchestra 3) At The Fat Man's by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra (Charlie Shavers, vocal) 4) Topsy by Count Basie & His Orchestra 5) The Joint is Really Jumpin' Down At Carnegie Hall by The Vaughn Monroe Orchestra 6) Pompton Turnpike by Charlie Barnet & His Orchestra 7) Jukebox Saturday Night by Glenn Miller (w/ Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) 8) Tuxedo Junction by Dave Pell & His Orchestra 9) Palm Springs Jump by Slim & Slam (Slam Stewart & Slim Gaillard & His Flat Foot Floogie Boys) 10) Blue Lou by The Metronome All-Star Band 11) You Couldn't Be Cuter by Benny Goodman & His Big Band (Martha Tilton, vocal) 12) Northwest Passage by Woody Herman 13) A Fine Romance by Lena Horne 14) What Is This Thing Called Love? By Artie Shaw & His Orchestra (Mel Torme & His Mel-Tones, vocals) 15) The Peanut Vendor by Stan Kenton & His Orchestra 16) Rockin' in Rhythm by Duke Ellington & His Orchestra and Ella Fitzgerald 17) Sing, Sing, Sing by Buddy Rich Quintet & Max Roach Quintet 18) You Make Me Feel So Young by Nancy Wright 19) Flying Home by Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra
"Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me)" was made famous by Glenn Miller and by the Andrews Sisters during World War II. Its lyrics are the words of two young lovers who pledge their fidelity while one of them is away serving in the war. In 1942 the Glenn Miller Orchestra recorded "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" with vocals by Tex Beneke, Marion Hutton, and The Modernaires. This record spent 13 weeks on the Billboard charts. It was the longest stint for a war song to hold first place. The Andrews Sisters’ version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2016. In this episode you'll hear: 1) Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree by Glenn Miller (w/ Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires) 2) That's Amore by Dean Martin 3) Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh! by The Andrews Sisters 4) Tutti Frutti by Pat Boone 5) The Hula Hoop Song by Georgia Gibbs 6) Put On A Happy Face by Tony Bennett 7) Mambo Italiano by Rosemary Clooney 8) Hello, Dolly! by Louis Armstrong 9) Old Cape Cod by Patti Page 10) (I Love You) Don't You Forget It by Perry Como 11) The Middle Age Mambo by Sophie Tucker 12) Shake, Rattle And Roll by Bill Haley & The Comets 13) Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue by Mitch Miller 14) Cabaret by Liza Minnelli 15) The Hokey Pokey by Ray Anthony and His Orchestra 16) Be My Life's Companion by The Mills Brothers 17) Sugartime by The McGuire Sisters 18) Goody Goody by Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers 19) New York, New York by Frank Sinatra 20) Heart Of My Heart by The Four Aces 21) Twistin' The Night Away by Sam Cooke 22) When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You) by Nat King Cole 23) God Bless America by Connie Francis
Bob Skyles and his Skyrockets and Tex Beneke start us off with a flourish. Sadly its the 'last chance saloon' for three of the records in this episode. Condition is a little far gone. Theses copies of Frank and James McCravy (Swinging on the golden gate), Leo Reisman(For my sweetheart) and Lucky Millinder(The spider and the fly) will not be joining us again. Mezzrow-Lardiner Quintet play: I ain't gonna give you none of this jelly roll(1938). Brilliant title. Mezz Mezzrow was an American clarinettist and saxophonist. He was a bit of a character, well known for his cannabis habit and his love of black American culture. Lovely piece of 1930s music from the Henry King Orchestra and Breeze. Next up two artists born in the Bengal region of India - Juthika Roy and Satya Chowdhury. Both had long successful careers on record and film. Juthika Roy's admirers included Gandhi and Nehru. We go out with the Bessie Smith: Muddy Water, a Mississippi Moan. Recorded in 1927 by The Empress of the Blues. Then the Murphys. Delia Murphy, collector of Irish traditional songs with Three lovely lassies and two from the extraordinary voice of Rose Murphy- The Chee Girl. Gee I wonder what the trouble can be and Busy line. Marvellous one and all.
Music can be therapeutic and evoke memories from the "good old days". Come take a Sentimental Journey down memory lane. If you long to remember times gone by, listen to these memorable songs. Tap your feet, sing along, and smile. "Those were the days." ***** In this episode you'll hear: 1) I've Got A Gal In Kalamazoo by Glenn Miller (Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) 2) Carolina in the Morning by Dean Martin 3) Just Because by The McGuire Sisters 4) Love Letters In The Sand by Pat Boone 5) Ain't We Got Fun by Doris Day 6) I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time by Wayne Newton 7) Wedding Bells (Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine) by The Four Aces 8) Jim Dandy by LaVern Baker & The Gliders 9) Cheek To Cheek by Frank Sinatra 10) Cabaret by Louis Armstrong & His All Stars 11) Hot Diggity by Perry Como 12) Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley & The Comets 13) The Middle Age Mambo by Sophie Tucker 14) I'm Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover by Mitch Miller 15) Glow Worm by The Mills Brothers 16) Everybody Loves To Cha Cha Cha by Sam Cooke 17) Standing On The Corner by The Four Lads 18) My Melancholy Baby by Tommy Edwards 19) Yellow Submarine by The Beatles 20) Rag Mop by The Ames Brothers 21) Show Me The Way To Go Home by Jive Bunny 22) When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You) by Nat King Cole 23) God Bless America by Connie Francis
On this edition of the MAKE BELIEVE BALLROOM, we look at Big Band era stars whose careers extended into the 50s and beyond, interviews and music of Tex Beneke and Margret Whiting and a historic recording by "Illinois" Jacquet plus a whole lot more swing and jazz!
Guaranteed to get you out of that “lockdown funk” - The Swingin’ With Danny Lane series highlights the music of the swing era and the dances that thrived in the ballrooms and dance halls. Danny Lane guides you through a two hour swing session. Do the Lindy Hop or choose your favorite dance. Just keep swingin'. ----- Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 ------ or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com ------ In this episode, you’ll hear: ---- 1) Tuxedo Junction by Debbie Curtis Radio Big Band 2) C Jam Blues by Duke Ellington 3) Saturday Night (Is The Loneliest Night In The Week) by Frank Sinatra 4) Ding Dong Daddy Of The D-Car Line by Cherry Poppin' Daddies 5) One O'Clock Jump by Red Bank Jazz Orchestra & Joe Muccioli 6) Frenesi by Eydie Gormé 7) Swingin' The Blues by Count Basie & His Orchestra 8) Gene's Boogie by Gene Krupa 9) Let's Dance by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra 10) Ain't Misbehavin' by Louis Armstrong 11) Forty-Second Street by Somethin' Smith & The Redheads 12) For Dancers Only by Ray Anthony & His Orchestra 13) Trickle, Trickle by The Manhattan Transfer 14) Tune Up by Junior Walker & The All Stars 15) One Of Them Good Ones by Buddy Johnson & His Band 16) A Gal in Calico by Tex Beneke and His Orchestra Playing the Music Made Famous by Glenn Miller 17) My Blue Heaven by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 18) Juke Box Baby by Perry Como 19) Black Bottom by Bunny Berigan 20) Manhattan Spiritual by Reg Owen Orchestra 21) Take The "A" Train by Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra 22) Your Feets Too Big by Fats Waller 23) Smooth Sailing by Ella Fitzgerald 24) Rock 'n' Roll by Red Prysock Band 25) Boo-Wah Boo-Wah by Cab Calloway 26) 'Tain't What You Do (It's The Way That You Do It) by Jimmie Lunceford 27) Jeep Jockey Jump by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 28) Good Rockin' Tonight by Wynonie Harris 29) Savoy by Lucky Millinder 30) Big John's Special by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra 31) Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop by Lionel Hampton 32) Caldonia by Louis Jordan 33) Killin' Jive by Cats & The Fiddle 34) Skyliner by The Manhattan Transfer 35) Palm Springs Jump by Slim & Slam (Slam Stewart & Slim Gaillard & His Flat Foot Floogie Boys) 36) Things Ain't What They Used To Be by Charlie Barnet & His Orchestra 37) The Ball Game by Sister Wynona Carr 38) Back Bay Shuffle by Artie Shaw & His Orchestra 39) The Frim Fram Sauce by Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald 40) Yes, Indeed! by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra
Episode 18 features some fantastic music from Will Bradley, Kay Starr, Tex Beneke, Peggy Lee, Bob Crosby and more. We also learn about Sensible Jane and her "ducky" new slip! ...and remember, if you want to listen to more Big Band and Swing Music check out SwingCityRadio.com to hear Your Big Band Favorites from the 1930's, 40's and Today! * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons. Artists are credited within the podcast.
From December 1939 to September 1942, Glenn Miller's band performed three times a week during a quarter-hour broadcast for Chesterfield cigarettes on CBS radio. The radio performances originated from such venues as The Roseland Ballroom in Boston MA, The Café Rouge in NYC, The Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle NY, and often from wherever they were in the United States doing their many road shows. In this episode you’ll hear: Chesterfield Broadcast of December 27, 1939 (The Inaugural Show) 1) Moonlight Serenade (Opening Theme) 2) Little Brown Jug 3) To You (w/ Ray Eberle, vocal) 4) Bei Mir Bist Du Schon (w/ The Andrews Sisters, vocals) 5) Danny Boy (Londonderry Air) 6) Ciribiribin (w/ The Andrews Sisters, vocals) 7) Medley: Star Dust (Something Old) Blue Orchids (Something New) Sunrise Serenade (Something Borrowed [Borrowed from Frankie Carle [his theme song]) Mood Indigo (Something Blue) (w/ Ray Eberle, vocal on Blue Orchids) 8) In The Mood 9) Moonlight Serenade (Closing Theme) Cafe Rouge Broadcast of December 21, 1940 1) Slumber Song (Opening Theme) 2) Daisy Mae 3) Helpless 4) Song Of The Volga Boatmen 5) Falling Leaves 6) Are You Jumpin' Jack 7) I Do, Do You? 8) Slumber Song (Closing Theme) Glenn Miller Broadcast from The Glen Island Casino on July 24, 1939 1) Moonlight Serenade (Opening Theme) 2) I Want To Be Happy 3) Oh! You Crazy Moon (w/ Ray Eberle, vocal) 4) Baby Me (w/ Kay Starr, vocal) 5) My Isle Of Golden Dreams 6) Moonlight Serenade (Closing Theme) Café Rouge Broadcast of 12/28/40 1) Slumber Song (Opening Theme) 2) Song Of The Volga Boatmen 3) You Walk By (Ray Eberle, vocal) 4) There I Go (Ray Eberle, vocal) 5) Oh! So Good 6) A Stone's Throw From Heaven (Ray Eberle, vocal) 7) I Dreamt I Dwelt In Harlem 8) Slumber Song (Closing Theme) Glenn Miller Civilian Band's Last Show of 9/27/42 Virtual Recreation 1) In the Mood [RARE 4 RIDE-OUTS VERSION] 2) Rhapsody in Blue 3) American Patrol 4) I've Got a Gal In Kalamazoo (w/ Tex Beneke, Marion Hutton & The Modernaires, vocals) 5) Jukebox Saturday Night (w/ Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke & The Modernaires, vocals) 6) At Last (w/ Ray Eberle, vocal) 7) Serenade In Blue (w/ Ray Eberle & The Modernaires, vocals) 8) It Must Be Jelly ('Cause Jam Don't Shake Like That) (w/ The Band & The Modernaires, vocals) 9) Moonlight Serenade (Closing Theme)
You can't go wrong with starting with Tex Beneke. We calm things down with a couple from Hutch - that rich, smooth voice- from 1938 and 1941. First time I've played Wurlitzer organ music and its from the 1937 BBC Radio's top star, Reginald Foort. The foremost organist of his day. He developed and designed his own mobile organ, well mobile is questionable, it weighed 30 tons! Early Hammond organ from the Milt Herth Trio (1942) and Bob Hamiton Trio (1938). Bob is playing the marvellous ' Dinner music for a pack of hungry cannibals.' Sheer madness. We also have Don Bestor Orchestra, Paula Green and her Orchestra, Red River Dave and Bud Freeman and his Suma Cum Laude Orch. A cracker from Al Dexter, ' When we go Honky Tonkin.' Hot string, early country music. Two more firsts: A 1955 Japanese track on the Teichiku record label and in Danish, Lulu Zeigler. Great performance of a dark sounding, 'At the docks.' We finish, appropriately, with 'On the Waterfront.' An excellent vocal version by Lorrae Desmond. Love her voice and the lush orchestration of Bob Sharples. Back in the day Bob provided the music for Opportunity Knocks, a British TV talent show. I mean that most sincerely folks!
From 1939 until his disappearance in 1942, Glenn Miller was the most successful of all the Big Bands of the Swing Era. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
From 1939 until his disappearance in 1942, Glenn Miller was the most successful of all the Big Bands of the Swing Era. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Episode 8 features music Tex Beneke, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ina Ray Hutton and more. We enjoy a classic performance by Harry James from Casino Gardens recorded in August of 1944. Also, you don't want to miss Ronnaldo going off on a small rant about smoking after listening to some old cigarette ads. Fred and Barney make an appearance. ...and remember, if you want to listen to more Big Band and Swing Music check out SwingCityRadio.com to hear "Your Big Band Favorites from the 1930's, 40's and Today!" * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons. Artists are credited within the podcast.
This week I am going to present two radio remotes from the Hollywood Palladium by Tex Beneke and the Glenn Miller Orchestra from 1946. The Miller estate authorized an official Glenn Miller "ghost band" in 1946. This band was led by Tex Beneke who as time went on had more prominence in the band's identity. It had a make up similar to Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band, having a large string section. Henry Mancini was the band's pianist and one of the arrangers. I hope you enjoy these radio remotes on the CBS network from 1946 by Tex Beneke. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com
From STUDIO 67 in Hollywood, it’s our BUDDIES LOUNGE HOLIDAY JUBILEE’s for 2019! Join the HO-HO-Host, the BIG W as he explores, with eggnog in hand, the Space-Age Pop Holiday Hi-Fi musical sounds of the 1950’s and the 1960’s in LIVING STEREO!! Playlist: • We Wish You The Merriest - Frank Sinatra • Happy Holiday - The Percy Faith Orchestra • That Holiday Feeling - Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé • Baby, It's Cold Outside - Ted Heath & Edmundo Ros • I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm - Dean Martin • Sun Valley Ski Run - Esquivel • Little Jack Frost, Get Lost - Bing Crosby & Peggy Lee • I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus - Ira Ironstrings • Kissin' By the Mistletoe - Aretha Franklin • Ding Dong Dandy Christmas - The Three Suns • It Happened In Sun Valley - Randy Van Horne Singers • Santa's Got A Brand New Bag - The Hollyridge Strings • There Is No Christmas Like a Home Christmas - Perry Como • Jingle Bells - Sammy Davis Jr. • Yulesville - Edd Byrnes • And The Bells Rang - Modernaires with Tex Beneke • My Favorite Things - Golddiggers • Christmas Alphabet - The McGuire Sisters • Nutcracker Suite - Les Brown • Joy - Glad Singers • Brazilian Sleigh Bells - Ferrante & Teicher • Here Comes Santa Claus - The Mills Brothers • Sleigh Ride - Al Caiola & Riz Ortolani • Warm December - Julie London • Christmas Tree - The Voices Of Walter Schumann • Frosty The Snowman - The Beach Boys • Dance, Mr. Snowman, Dance - The Crew Cuts • The Merriest - June Christy • The Christmas Song - Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 • It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year - Andy Williams • Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town - The Ventures • Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer - Wayne Newton • Toy Parade - Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra • Beautiful City - The New Christy Minstrels • Jingle Bell Rock - Bobby Vee • Good King Wenceslas - Stan Kenton • Go Tell It On the Mountain - Bobby Darin Winter • Wonderland - Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass • The Happiest Christmas Tree - Nat "King" Cole • Hallelujah - Harry Simeone
Valentine's Day of 1949 brings us yet another confection, as Bob, Ray Sherman (piano), Jud De Naut (bass), and Ralph Collier (drums) perform both old standards and contemporary hits. After the "Sweet Georgia Brown" intro (and a Frank Barton lecture), the quartet launches into a song Tex Beneke would have success with, "Look Up". Then, song star Margo Powers steps to the mic for her rendition of "Far Away Places", a popular tune that in 1949 would have no less than four different performances on the air: Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Margaret Whiting, and Perry Como all hit the charts with it. The quartet then smolders once again for "Misirlou" (they'd done it back in January on Episode 4). Margo returns for a tune from the '20's, "Dear Old Southland" before Bob and the guys close out with "Crazy Rhythm". This particular transcription has a little more fuzz, but listen past that and enjoy this Valentine's treat!
Shellac Stack No. 165 swings with the goons and crazy people! We hear from Rosalind Paige, Bunk Johnson, Charlie Thompson, Teddy Wilson, Dick Robertson, Tex Beneke, Helen Ward, Ted Weems, Eubie Blake, Peter Wyper, and many more in this musical variety hour!
Show 53, “The Jazz Age,” features a variety of jazz performances, both vocal and instrumental, from the 1930s through the 1950s. Performers include Anita O’Day, Tex Beneke, The Andrews Sisters, Mildred Bailey, Woody Herman, Louis... Read More The post Episode 53, “The Jazz Age,” appeared first on Sam Waldron.
Here's the second episode, on "Roll 'Em Pete" by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson. One erratum before we continue -- in the episode, I say that "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" follows a particular formula common in hokum songs. That's not actually true for the original version -- it is true for Bill Haley's cover version, and Elvis' and the versions after them, but in Joe Turner's version the part we now know as the chorus didn't come in until near the end. Sorry about the mistake. ----more---- Resources As always, I've put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has "In the Mood" and "the Booglie Wooglie Piggy" by Glenn Miller, "Roll 'Em Pete" and "It's All Right Baby" by Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by Joe Turner, "I Need A Little Sugar in my Bowl" by Bessie Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" by Pinetop Smith, and "Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Bill Haley For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can. Lionel Hampton's autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap. The Spirituals to Swing concerts have been released on CD, but sadly that's also out of print -- this is the definitive version, but hopefully at some point they'll get a rerelease at a reasonable price. Transcript "It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it" -- in Chuck Berry's classic song "Rock and Roll Music", that's the only line that actually talks about what the music is. The backbeat is, to all intents and purposes , the thing that differentiates early rock and roll from the music that preceded it. And like all of early rock and roll, it's something that had predecessors in rock's pre-history. If you don't know what a backbeat is... well, in the days of swing, and even on a lot of very early rock and roll records, the typical beat you'd have is one called a shuffle, which sounds like you'd expect from the name, it's a sort of tit-tit-tit-tit [demonstrates] kind of sound, and you'd generally stress the first beat in the bar. [demonstrates] ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and. The shuffle rhythm was *the* swing rhythm -- so much so that often you'll see "shuffle rhythm" and "swing time" used interchangeably. Listen, for example, to the introduction to "In the Mood" by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest-selling swing record of all time [plays section of song]. That's a shuffle. That's swing music, and that rhythm was the basis of almost all pre-war popular music, one way or the other. It's a good, strong, sound -- there's a reason why it was popular -- but... it's a little bit polite. A little bit tame. A backbeat, on the other hand, gives you a straight, simple, pulse. You stress the second and fourth beats in a bar -- boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP. It's a simpler rhythm, but a more exciting one. That's the rhythm that made rock and roll. Players in blues and jazz music had been using that rhythm, off and on, since the 1920s. Lionel Hampton, in his autobiography, talking about his earliest work as a drummer before switching to vibraphone, says "I had a different style on drums. I was already playing with a heavy afterbeat, getting that rock-and-roll beat that wouldn't even get popular until the 1950s. I wanted people to dance, have a good time, clap their hands, and they would do it to my drumming." And that's what a backbeat does -- it gives people somewhere to clap their hands, a very clear signal, you clap on TWO and FOUR. But while Hampton was playing like that, he was never recorded doing that, and nor were any other drummers at the time. In fact, the first recording in the prehistory of rock generally credited as having a backbeat doesn't even have a drummer on it at all. Rather, it features just a vocalist, Big Joe Turner, and a piano player, Pete Johnson. The song, which was recorded in December 1938, is called "Roll 'Em Pete". Now, before we go any further, I want to say something about that "generally credited". There are two problems with it -- the first is that "Roll 'Em Pete", at least in the version recorded under that name, doesn't have a particularly pronounced backbeat at all, and the second is that there *were* other records being made, long before 1938, which do. But that's the way of these things, as we'll see over and over again. The first anything is messy. But "Roll 'Em Pete" is still a hugely important record, in ways that are more important than whether it has a backbeat on it. So let's have a look at it. Pete Johnson was a boogie-woogie player -- yet another of the musical streams which fed into early rock and roll. Boogie woogie was a style of piano playing that became popular in the 1930s, where the left hand would play a strong bassline -- you almost certainly know the generic boogie bassline style, which goes like this [demonstrates] -- while the right hand would play decorative melodic stuff over it. That bassline and melody combination was the most popular style of playing for a time, and it became the cornerstone of rock piano playing, as well as of country music and much else. The bassline would have eight notes in a typical bar, and "eight to the bar" was another term some used for boogie woogie at the time. But boogie woogie was, for the most part, based on that shuffle rhythm. Listen to "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" by Pinetop Smith, the first real boogie record, from 1928, and you'll hear a rhythm which isn't so different to that Glenn Miller record from a decade or so later. "Roll 'Em Pete" changed that. Pete Johnson was considered one of the greatest exponents of the boogie-woogie style, and in 1938 when John Hammond was putting together his "Spirituals to Swing" concerts, it was natural that Hammond would choose Johnson to perform. These concerts -- one in 1938 and one in 1939 -- were probably the most important concerts in popular music history. That's not an exaggeration, by any means, it's just a fact. At the beginning of 1938, Hammond had promoted a concert by the Benny Goodman band at Carnegie, and that concert itself had been an impressive event -- it was the first time an integrated band had played Carnegie Hall, and the first time that popular music had been treated as seriously as classical music. For a follow-up, at Christmas 1938, Hammond wanted to present only black musicians, but to an integrated audience. He wanted, in fact, to present a history of black music, from "primitive" folk forms to big band swing. This was, to say the least, a controversial choice, and in the end the event was sponsored by The New Masses, a magazine published by the Communist Party USA. And the lineup for that show was pretty much a who's who of black American music at the time. Hammond had wanted to get Robert Johnson, but he discovered that Johnson had recently died -- Johnson's place was taken by a then-obscure folk musician called Big Bill Broonzy, who became popular largely on the basis of that appearance. Sonny Terry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, the Count Basie Orchestra, and more all appeared, and the show was successful enough that the next year there was a follow-up, with many of the same musicians, which also featured the Benny Goodman Sextet. For this show, as well as playing on his own, Pete Johnson was backing a blues shouter called Big Joe Turner. And "shouter" was the word for what Turner did. If you don't know about blues shouters, that's unsurprising -- it's a style of music that went out of fashion with the big bands. But a blues shouter was a singer -- usually a man -- who could sing loudly and powerfully enough that he could be heard over a band, without amplification. In the early twentieth century, microphones were unknown at first, and singers had to be able to be heard over the musicians simply by the force of their voices. Some singers used megaphones as a crude form of amplification, but many more simply had to belt out their vocals as loud as they could. Even after microphones were introduced, they were unreliable and amplification wasn't very powerful. And at the same time bands were getting bigger and louder -- blues shouters like Big Joe Turner could compete with that power, and get a crowd excited by the sheer volume of their voice, even over bands like Count Basie's. But for the Carnegie Hall show, Turner and Pete Johnson were playing together, just the two of them. And while they were in New York, they had a recording session, and recorded a track that some say is the first rock and roll record ever. "Roll 'Em Pete" has the first recorded example -- as far as anyone has been able to discover -- of a boogie song which uses a backbeat rather than a shuffle beat. All the musical elements of early rock and roll are there in Pete Johnson's piano part -- in particular, listen to the phrasing in his right-hand part. Those melody lines he's playing, if you transfer them to guitar, are basically the whole of Chuck Berry's guitar style, but you can also hear Jerry Lee Lewis in there. Now you might be listening to the track and saying to yourself "I don't really hear that much of a difference with the earlier song -- are you sure it's got more of a backbeat?" If you are, I don't blame you -- but there's a version of this song with a much clearer backbeat, and that's the live recording of Turner and Johnson performing the song at Carnegie Hall the week earlier -- that performance is titled "It's Alright Baby" rather than "Roll 'Em Pete" on the official recordings, but it's the same song. There, Turner is clapping along on the backbeat, and you can hear the claps clearly. Now this isn't a clearcut differentiation -- you can play music in such a way that you can have a shuffle beat going up against a backbeat, and that's a lot of what's going on in boogie music of this period, and the two rhythms rubbing up against each other is a lot of what drives early rock and roll. Talking about a "first backbeat record" is almost as ridiculous as talking about a "first rock and roll record" or a "first soul record". And the more I've listened to this song and the other music of its time, the less convinced I am that this specific song has something altogether new. But still, it's a great example of boogie, of blues, and of the music that would become rock and roll, and it's one you can clearly point to and say "that has all the elements that will later go into rock and roll music. Perhaps not in exactly the same proportions, perhaps not in a way that's massively different from its predecessors, but like "Flying Home", which we talked about last time, it's as good a place to start as any. And this is, have no doubt about it, a record of important performers. Before we go into why, we'll talk briefly about the song, and particularly about the lyrics -- or, more precisely, the way that they aren't really coherent lyrics at all. This is something we'll be seeing a lot of in the future -- a blues tradition called "floating lyrics". A song like "Roll 'Em Pete", you see, isn't really a song in the conventional sense. There's a melodic structure there, and over that melodic structure the singer would improvise. And when blues singers improvised, they'd tend to pull out lyrics from a set of pre-existing phrases that they knew worked. "Well, I got a gal, she lives up on the hill/Well, this woman's tryin' to quit me, Lord, but I love her still" is the opening line, and that is one of those floating lyrics -- though sometimes, depending on the singer, the women says she loves me but I don't believe she will, or doesn't love me but her sister will. Most of Turner's songs were made up of these floating lyrics, and this is something we'll see happening more in the early years of rock and roll, as we look at those. The whole idea of floating lyrics, sadly, makes authorship claims for songs somewhat difficult, and rock and roll, like blues and country before it, was essentially a folk artform to start with. We'll see several examples of people taking credit as "songwriters" for things that are put together from a bunch of pre-existing elements, striking it lucky, and becoming millionaires as a result. Turner and Johnson could stretch "Roll 'Em Pete" out to an hour sometimes, with Turner just singing new lyrics as needed, and no recording can really capture what they were doing in live performance -- and this is the problem with much of the prehistory of rock and roll, as so much of it was created by musicians who were live performers first and recording artists a distant second, if at all. But those live performances mattered. In 1938, when Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons made their appearances in the Spirituals to Swing shows, boogie woogie was something of a minority form -- it was something that had had a brief popularity a decade earlier and which was largely forgotten. That show changed that, and suddenly boogie woogie was the biggest thing in music -- every big band started playing boogie woogie music, adapted to the big band style. The Andrews Sisters sang about "the boogie woogie bugle boy of company B" and wanted you to "beat me daddy, eight to the bar" (and then, presumably feeling dirty after that, wanted you to "scrub me mama to a boogie beat"). Tommy Dorsey recorded "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" (renamed as "TD's Boogie Woogie"), and you got... well, things like this. [play excerpt of "The Booglie Wooglie Piggy" by Glenn Miller] That's the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest band of the forties, with Tex Beneke singing about a booglie wooglie piggy. They don't write them like that any more. Most of this music, as you can hear, was still using that swing beat, but it was clearly boogie woogie music, and that became the biggest style of music in late-period big band music, the music that was popular in the early 1940s. Even in songs that aren't directly about being boogie-woogie -- like, say, Glenn Miller's "Chatanooga Choo Choo" -- you still get that boogie rhythm, and nods to the generic boogie bassline and you get lines like "when you hear that whistle blowing eight to the bar, then you know that Tennessee is not very far". And that influence had a bigger impact than it might otherwise have done, and became something bigger than just a fad, because between 1941 and 1943 a whole host of events conspired to change the music industry forever. Most importantly, of course, the Second World War reached America, and that caused a lot of problems for the big band industry -- men who would otherwise have been playing in those bands were being drafted, as were men who would otherwise have been going out dancing to those bands. But there were two smaller events that, if anything, made even more impact. The first of these was the ASCAP boycott. The American Society of Composers and Publishers was -- and still is -- an organisation that represented most of the most important songwriters and music publishers in the USA, the people who had been writing the most successful songs. They collected royalties for live performances and radio plays, and distributed them to the composers and publishers who made up their membership. And they only dealt with the respectable Tin Pan Alley composers, but that covered enough songs -- in the early forties they had a repertoire of one and a quarter million songs, including all the most popular songs that the big bands were playing. And then for ten months in 1941, they banned all the radio stations in the USA from playing any of their songs, over a royalty dispute. This should have been catastrophic for the radio stations, and would have been if there hadn't been another organisation, BMI, set up as a rival to ASCAP a couple of years earlier. BMI dealt with only the low-class music -- the blues, and country songs, and gospel songs, and hillbilly music, and boogie. The stuff ASCAP didn't think was important. Except that now all that music became *very* important, because that was all you could play on the radio. Well, that and public domain songs, but pretty soon everyone was bored of hearing "I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair". And so there was suddenly a much bigger audience for all the hillbilly and blues performers, all of whom had incorporated the boogie style into their own styles. And then, just as the music industry was getting back on its feet after that, there was what is still the biggest entertainment strike in US history -- the musicians' union strike of 1942-44. This time, the strike didn't affect anyone playing on the radio -- so long as it was a live performance. But because of a dispute over royalties, no instrumentalist was allowed to record for the major record labels for two years. This had several effects, all of them profound. Firstly, the big bands all recorded a *lot* of music to stockpile in the last weeks before the strike, and this meant that the styles that were current in July 1942 effectively stayed current -- at least as far as the record-buying public was concerned. For two years, the only big band music that could be released was from that stockpile, so the music recorded during the boogie fad stayed around longer than it otherwise might have, and remained a major part of the culture. Secondly, the ban only affected the major labels. Guess who was on the minor labels, the ones that could keep making music and putting it out? That's right, those blues and hillbilly musicians, and those boogie piano players. The same ones whose songs had just spent a year being the only ones the famous bands could play, and now after being given that free publicity by the famous bands, they had no competition from them. Third -- and this is a real negative effect of the strike, one which is an immense historical tragedy for music lovers -- there was a new form of jazz being invented in New York between 1942 and 1944 by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, people who played in the big bands but were also doing something new in their side gigs. That form later became known as be-bop, or just bop, and is some of the most important music of the twentieth century, but we have no recordings of its birth And fourth -- the strike didn't affect singers. So Tommy Dorsey's band couldn't record anything, but Dorsey's old vocalist, Frank Sinatra, could, backed by a vocal group instead of instrumentalists. And so could lots of other singers. The end result of all this was that, at the end of 1944, swing was effectively dead, as was the tradition of instrumentalists being the stars in American music. From that time on, the stars would stop being trombone players like Glenn Miller or clarinetists like Benny Goodman -- or piano players like Pete Johnson. Instead they were singers, like Frank Sinatra -- and like Joe Turner. The swing musicians either went into bebop, and thus more or less vanish from this story (though their own story is always worth following up), or they went into playing the new forms of music that had sprung up, in particular one form which was inspired by swing bands like Lionel Hampton's and Count Basie's, but also by the boogie music that had influenced them, and by the blues. That form was called rhythm and blues, and Joe Turner became one of its biggest stars. Seventeen years after "Roll 'Em Pete", Joe Turner recorded another song, which became his most well-known contribution to popular music. That song was written by the songwriter Jesse Stone -- though he was using the name "Charles Calhoun", because he was a member of ASCAP under his real name, and this was a BMI song if ever there was one -- but you can hear that there's a very, very clear line to "Roll 'Em Pete". The main difference here is that the backbeat is now stressed, almost to the point of parody, because "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" is a rock and roll song. We'll be hearing more about Jesse Stone in a few songs' time, but for now we'll just talk about this song. That's Connie Kay, the drummer from the Modern Jazz Quartet, you can hear there doing that "whap, whap" snare drum playing. It's safe to say that's not the subtlest piece of drumming he ever did, but it may well be the most influential. "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" is definitely the *same kind of thing* as "Roll 'Em Pete", isn't it? The piano playing is similar, Turner's blues shouting is the same kind of thing, the vocal melody is similar, both are structured around twelve-bar blueses, and both songs are made up largely of floating lyrics. But "Shake Rattle and Roll" is rock and roll, and it was covered by both Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, the two biggest white rock and roll singers of the time, and Turner would perform it on shows promoted by Alan Freed, the man who claimed to have coined the term "rock and roll". So what makes the difference? Well, firstly that backbeat from Connie Kay, that gives it a much bigger forward momentum. But there's a few other things as well -- influences from other genres that fed into rock and roll. There's the obvious one, of the saxophone. That's from rhythm and blues, and it's something that rhythm and blues got from swing. Remember Ilinois Jacquet's solo on "Flying Home" from last episode? That's a very clear progenitor for this. But there's also the influence of another type of song -- one most people who talk about the origins of rock and roll don't even think of as being a separate type of music, as it just gets rolled up into "blues". The hokum song is a type of music with a long history, which can trace its origins through vaudeville back to minstrel songs. It was originally for comedy performances more than anything else, but later a whole subgenre of them started being just songs about sex. Some of the more euphemistic of them are songs like "Fishing Pole Blues", which has lines like "want to go fishing in my fishing hole/If you want to fish with me you'd better have a great big pole", or songs called things like "Banana in my Fruit Basket", I Want a Hot-Dog in my Roll", "It's Tight Like That" and "Warm My Weiner". There were less euphemistic songs, too, called things like "Bull Dyke Blues", but I won't look at those in any more detail here as I don't want this podcast to get put in an "adults only" section. Suffice to say, there was plenty of very, very obscene music as well as the comedy songs and the more euphemistic material. And the other thing about hokum songs is that they stuck to a fairly straightforward formula. There weren't the complicated structures of the Tin Pan Alley songs of the time, there was a simple pattern of a verse which had different lyrics every time and a chorus which was always the same, and the two would alternate. The chorus would usually be a twelve-bar blues, and more often than not so would the verse, though sometimes it would be an eight-bar blues instead. And this is the pattern that you would get in rock and roll songs throughout the fifties. It's the pattern of "Tutti Frutti", of "Maybelline", of "Rock Around the Clock", and of "Shake Rattle and Roll". And "Shake Rattle and Roll", while it's not the dirtiest song in history or anything, is certainly fairly blatant about its subject matter. (Hilariously, Bill Haley's cover version is famously "cleaned up" -- they took out lines like "the way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through" and "I believe to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose" in case they were too dirty. But they left in "I'm like a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea-food store"...) So that's what rock and roll was, in its early stages -- a blues shouter, singing over a boogie-inspired piano part, with a backbeat on the snare drum, a structure and lyrics patterned after the hokum song, and horns coming out of swing music. And there is a very, very clear line to that from "Roll 'Em Pete", and the boogie-woogie revival of 1938, and the "Spirituals to Swing" concerts. But wait... isn't the cliche that rock and roll comes from R&B mixed with country music? Where's all the country music in this? Well, that cliche is slightly wrong. Rock doesn't have much influence from the country music, but it has a lot of influence from Western music. And for that, we'll have to wait until next episode. Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
Here’s the second episode, on “Roll ‘Em Pete” by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson. One erratum before we continue — in the episode, I say that “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” follows a particular formula common in hokum songs. That’s not actually true for the original version — it is true for Bill Haley’s cover version, and Elvis’ and the versions after them, but in Joe Turner’s version the part we now know as the chorus didn’t come in until near the end. Sorry about the mistake. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has “In the Mood” and “the Booglie Wooglie Piggy” by Glenn Miller, “Roll ‘Em Pete” and “It’s All Right Baby” by Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Joe Turner, “I Need A Little Sugar in my Bowl” by Bessie Smith, “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” by Pinetop Smith, and “Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Bill Haley For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can. Lionel Hampton’s autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap. The Spirituals to Swing concerts have been released on CD, but sadly that’s also out of print — this is the definitive version, but hopefully at some point they’ll get a rerelease at a reasonable price. Transcript “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it” — in Chuck Berry’s classic song “Rock and Roll Music”, that’s the only line that actually talks about what the music is. The backbeat is, to all intents and purposes , the thing that differentiates early rock and roll from the music that preceded it. And like all of early rock and roll, it’s something that had predecessors in rock’s pre-history. If you don’t know what a backbeat is… well, in the days of swing, and even on a lot of very early rock and roll records, the typical beat you’d have is one called a shuffle, which sounds like you’d expect from the name, it’s a sort of tit-tit-tit-tit [demonstrates] kind of sound, and you’d generally stress the first beat in the bar. [demonstrates] ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and. The shuffle rhythm was *the* swing rhythm — so much so that often you’ll see “shuffle rhythm” and “swing time” used interchangeably. Listen, for example, to the introduction to “In the Mood” by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest-selling swing record of all time [plays section of song]. That’s a shuffle. That’s swing music, and that rhythm was the basis of almost all pre-war popular music, one way or the other. It’s a good, strong, sound — there’s a reason why it was popular — but… it’s a little bit polite. A little bit tame. A backbeat, on the other hand, gives you a straight, simple, pulse. You stress the second and fourth beats in a bar — boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP. It’s a simpler rhythm, but a more exciting one. That’s the rhythm that made rock and roll. Players in blues and jazz music had been using that rhythm, off and on, since the 1920s. Lionel Hampton, in his autobiography, talking about his earliest work as a drummer before switching to vibraphone, says “I had a different style on drums. I was already playing with a heavy afterbeat, getting that rock-and-roll beat that wouldn’t even get popular until the 1950s. I wanted people to dance, have a good time, clap their hands, and they would do it to my drumming.” And that’s what a backbeat does — it gives people somewhere to clap their hands, a very clear signal, you clap on TWO and FOUR. But while Hampton was playing like that, he was never recorded doing that, and nor were any other drummers at the time. In fact, the first recording in the prehistory of rock generally credited as having a backbeat doesn’t even have a drummer on it at all. Rather, it features just a vocalist, Big Joe Turner, and a piano player, Pete Johnson. The song, which was recorded in December 1938, is called “Roll ‘Em Pete”. Now, before we go any further, I want to say something about that “generally credited”. There are two problems with it — the first is that “Roll ‘Em Pete”, at least in the version recorded under that name, doesn’t have a particularly pronounced backbeat at all, and the second is that there *were* other records being made, long before 1938, which do. But that’s the way of these things, as we’ll see over and over again. The first anything is messy. But “Roll ‘Em Pete” is still a hugely important record, in ways that are more important than whether it has a backbeat on it. So let’s have a look at it. Pete Johnson was a boogie-woogie player — yet another of the musical streams which fed into early rock and roll. Boogie woogie was a style of piano playing that became popular in the 1930s, where the left hand would play a strong bassline — you almost certainly know the generic boogie bassline style, which goes like this [demonstrates] — while the right hand would play decorative melodic stuff over it. That bassline and melody combination was the most popular style of playing for a time, and it became the cornerstone of rock piano playing, as well as of country music and much else. The bassline would have eight notes in a typical bar, and “eight to the bar” was another term some used for boogie woogie at the time. But boogie woogie was, for the most part, based on that shuffle rhythm. Listen to “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” by Pinetop Smith, the first real boogie record, from 1928, and you’ll hear a rhythm which isn’t so different to that Glenn Miller record from a decade or so later. “Roll ‘Em Pete” changed that. Pete Johnson was considered one of the greatest exponents of the boogie-woogie style, and in 1938 when John Hammond was putting together his “Spirituals to Swing” concerts, it was natural that Hammond would choose Johnson to perform. These concerts — one in 1938 and one in 1939 — were probably the most important concerts in popular music history. That’s not an exaggeration, by any means, it’s just a fact. At the beginning of 1938, Hammond had promoted a concert by the Benny Goodman band at Carnegie, and that concert itself had been an impressive event — it was the first time an integrated band had played Carnegie Hall, and the first time that popular music had been treated as seriously as classical music. For a follow-up, at Christmas 1938, Hammond wanted to present only black musicians, but to an integrated audience. He wanted, in fact, to present a history of black music, from “primitive” folk forms to big band swing. This was, to say the least, a controversial choice, and in the end the event was sponsored by The New Masses, a magazine published by the Communist Party USA. And the lineup for that show was pretty much a who’s who of black American music at the time. Hammond had wanted to get Robert Johnson, but he discovered that Johnson had recently died — Johnson’s place was taken by a then-obscure folk musician called Big Bill Broonzy, who became popular largely on the basis of that appearance. Sonny Terry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, the Count Basie Orchestra, and more all appeared, and the show was successful enough that the next year there was a follow-up, with many of the same musicians, which also featured the Benny Goodman Sextet. For this show, as well as playing on his own, Pete Johnson was backing a blues shouter called Big Joe Turner. And “shouter” was the word for what Turner did. If you don’t know about blues shouters, that’s unsurprising — it’s a style of music that went out of fashion with the big bands. But a blues shouter was a singer — usually a man — who could sing loudly and powerfully enough that he could be heard over a band, without amplification. In the early twentieth century, microphones were unknown at first, and singers had to be able to be heard over the musicians simply by the force of their voices. Some singers used megaphones as a crude form of amplification, but many more simply had to belt out their vocals as loud as they could. Even after microphones were introduced, they were unreliable and amplification wasn’t very powerful. And at the same time bands were getting bigger and louder — blues shouters like Big Joe Turner could compete with that power, and get a crowd excited by the sheer volume of their voice, even over bands like Count Basie’s. But for the Carnegie Hall show, Turner and Pete Johnson were playing together, just the two of them. And while they were in New York, they had a recording session, and recorded a track that some say is the first rock and roll record ever. “Roll ‘Em Pete” has the first recorded example — as far as anyone has been able to discover — of a boogie song which uses a backbeat rather than a shuffle beat. All the musical elements of early rock and roll are there in Pete Johnson’s piano part — in particular, listen to the phrasing in his right-hand part. Those melody lines he’s playing, if you transfer them to guitar, are basically the whole of Chuck Berry’s guitar style, but you can also hear Jerry Lee Lewis in there. Now you might be listening to the track and saying to yourself “I don’t really hear that much of a difference with the earlier song — are you sure it’s got more of a backbeat?” If you are, I don’t blame you — but there’s a version of this song with a much clearer backbeat, and that’s the live recording of Turner and Johnson performing the song at Carnegie Hall the week earlier — that performance is titled “It’s Alright Baby” rather than “Roll ‘Em Pete” on the official recordings, but it’s the same song. There, Turner is clapping along on the backbeat, and you can hear the claps clearly. Now this isn’t a clearcut differentiation — you can play music in such a way that you can have a shuffle beat going up against a backbeat, and that’s a lot of what’s going on in boogie music of this period, and the two rhythms rubbing up against each other is a lot of what drives early rock and roll. Talking about a “first backbeat record” is almost as ridiculous as talking about a “first rock and roll record” or a “first soul record”. And the more I’ve listened to this song and the other music of its time, the less convinced I am that this specific song has something altogether new. But still, it’s a great example of boogie, of blues, and of the music that would become rock and roll, and it’s one you can clearly point to and say “that has all the elements that will later go into rock and roll music. Perhaps not in exactly the same proportions, perhaps not in a way that’s massively different from its predecessors, but like “Flying Home”, which we talked about last time, it’s as good a place to start as any. And this is, have no doubt about it, a record of important performers. Before we go into why, we’ll talk briefly about the song, and particularly about the lyrics — or, more precisely, the way that they aren’t really coherent lyrics at all. This is something we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future — a blues tradition called “floating lyrics”. A song like “Roll ‘Em Pete”, you see, isn’t really a song in the conventional sense. There’s a melodic structure there, and over that melodic structure the singer would improvise. And when blues singers improvised, they’d tend to pull out lyrics from a set of pre-existing phrases that they knew worked. “Well, I got a gal, she lives up on the hill/Well, this woman’s tryin’ to quit me, Lord, but I love her still” is the opening line, and that is one of those floating lyrics — though sometimes, depending on the singer, the women says she loves me but I don’t believe she will, or doesn’t love me but her sister will. Most of Turner’s songs were made up of these floating lyrics, and this is something we’ll see happening more in the early years of rock and roll, as we look at those. The whole idea of floating lyrics, sadly, makes authorship claims for songs somewhat difficult, and rock and roll, like blues and country before it, was essentially a folk artform to start with. We’ll see several examples of people taking credit as “songwriters” for things that are put together from a bunch of pre-existing elements, striking it lucky, and becoming millionaires as a result. Turner and Johnson could stretch “Roll ‘Em Pete” out to an hour sometimes, with Turner just singing new lyrics as needed, and no recording can really capture what they were doing in live performance — and this is the problem with much of the prehistory of rock and roll, as so much of it was created by musicians who were live performers first and recording artists a distant second, if at all. But those live performances mattered. In 1938, when Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons made their appearances in the Spirituals to Swing shows, boogie woogie was something of a minority form — it was something that had had a brief popularity a decade earlier and which was largely forgotten. That show changed that, and suddenly boogie woogie was the biggest thing in music — every big band started playing boogie woogie music, adapted to the big band style. The Andrews Sisters sang about “the boogie woogie bugle boy of company B” and wanted you to “beat me daddy, eight to the bar” (and then, presumably feeling dirty after that, wanted you to “scrub me mama to a boogie beat”). Tommy Dorsey recorded “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” (renamed as “TD’s Boogie Woogie”), and you got… well, things like this. [play excerpt of “The Booglie Wooglie Piggy” by Glenn Miller] That’s the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest band of the forties, with Tex Beneke singing about a booglie wooglie piggy. They don’t write them like that any more. Most of this music, as you can hear, was still using that swing beat, but it was clearly boogie woogie music, and that became the biggest style of music in late-period big band music, the music that was popular in the early 1940s. Even in songs that aren’t directly about being boogie-woogie — like, say, Glenn Miller’s “Chatanooga Choo Choo” — you still get that boogie rhythm, and nods to the generic boogie bassline and you get lines like “when you hear that whistle blowing eight to the bar, then you know that Tennessee is not very far”. And that influence had a bigger impact than it might otherwise have done, and became something bigger than just a fad, because between 1941 and 1943 a whole host of events conspired to change the music industry forever. Most importantly, of course, the Second World War reached America, and that caused a lot of problems for the big band industry — men who would otherwise have been playing in those bands were being drafted, as were men who would otherwise have been going out dancing to those bands. But there were two smaller events that, if anything, made even more impact. The first of these was the ASCAP boycott. The American Society of Composers and Publishers was — and still is — an organisation that represented most of the most important songwriters and music publishers in the USA, the people who had been writing the most successful songs. They collected royalties for live performances and radio plays, and distributed them to the composers and publishers who made up their membership. And they only dealt with the respectable Tin Pan Alley composers, but that covered enough songs — in the early forties they had a repertoire of one and a quarter million songs, including all the most popular songs that the big bands were playing. And then for ten months in 1941, they banned all the radio stations in the USA from playing any of their songs, over a royalty dispute. This should have been catastrophic for the radio stations, and would have been if there hadn’t been another organisation, BMI, set up as a rival to ASCAP a couple of years earlier. BMI dealt with only the low-class music — the blues, and country songs, and gospel songs, and hillbilly music, and boogie. The stuff ASCAP didn’t think was important. Except that now all that music became *very* important, because that was all you could play on the radio. Well, that and public domain songs, but pretty soon everyone was bored of hearing “I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair”. And so there was suddenly a much bigger audience for all the hillbilly and blues performers, all of whom had incorporated the boogie style into their own styles. And then, just as the music industry was getting back on its feet after that, there was what is still the biggest entertainment strike in US history — the musicians’ union strike of 1942-44. This time, the strike didn’t affect anyone playing on the radio — so long as it was a live performance. But because of a dispute over royalties, no instrumentalist was allowed to record for the major record labels for two years. This had several effects, all of them profound. Firstly, the big bands all recorded a *lot* of music to stockpile in the last weeks before the strike, and this meant that the styles that were current in July 1942 effectively stayed current — at least as far as the record-buying public was concerned. For two years, the only big band music that could be released was from that stockpile, so the music recorded during the boogie fad stayed around longer than it otherwise might have, and remained a major part of the culture. Secondly, the ban only affected the major labels. Guess who was on the minor labels, the ones that could keep making music and putting it out? That’s right, those blues and hillbilly musicians, and those boogie piano players. The same ones whose songs had just spent a year being the only ones the famous bands could play, and now after being given that free publicity by the famous bands, they had no competition from them. Third — and this is a real negative effect of the strike, one which is an immense historical tragedy for music lovers — there was a new form of jazz being invented in New York between 1942 and 1944 by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, people who played in the big bands but were also doing something new in their side gigs. That form later became known as be-bop, or just bop, and is some of the most important music of the twentieth century, but we have no recordings of its birth And fourth — the strike didn’t affect singers. So Tommy Dorsey’s band couldn’t record anything, but Dorsey’s old vocalist, Frank Sinatra, could, backed by a vocal group instead of instrumentalists. And so could lots of other singers. The end result of all this was that, at the end of 1944, swing was effectively dead, as was the tradition of instrumentalists being the stars in American music. From that time on, the stars would stop being trombone players like Glenn Miller or clarinetists like Benny Goodman — or piano players like Pete Johnson. Instead they were singers, like Frank Sinatra — and like Joe Turner. The swing musicians either went into bebop, and thus more or less vanish from this story (though their own story is always worth following up), or they went into playing the new forms of music that had sprung up, in particular one form which was inspired by swing bands like Lionel Hampton’s and Count Basie’s, but also by the boogie music that had influenced them, and by the blues. That form was called rhythm and blues, and Joe Turner became one of its biggest stars. Seventeen years after “Roll ‘Em Pete”, Joe Turner recorded another song, which became his most well-known contribution to popular music. That song was written by the songwriter Jesse Stone — though he was using the name “Charles Calhoun”, because he was a member of ASCAP under his real name, and this was a BMI song if ever there was one — but you can hear that there’s a very, very clear line to “Roll ‘Em Pete”. The main difference here is that the backbeat is now stressed, almost to the point of parody, because “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” is a rock and roll song. We’ll be hearing more about Jesse Stone in a few songs’ time, but for now we’ll just talk about this song. That’s Connie Kay, the drummer from the Modern Jazz Quartet, you can hear there doing that “whap, whap” snare drum playing. It’s safe to say that’s not the subtlest piece of drumming he ever did, but it may well be the most influential. “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” is definitely the *same kind of thing* as “Roll ‘Em Pete”, isn’t it? The piano playing is similar, Turner’s blues shouting is the same kind of thing, the vocal melody is similar, both are structured around twelve-bar blueses, and both songs are made up largely of floating lyrics. But “Shake Rattle and Roll” is rock and roll, and it was covered by both Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, the two biggest white rock and roll singers of the time, and Turner would perform it on shows promoted by Alan Freed, the man who claimed to have coined the term “rock and roll”. So what makes the difference? Well, firstly that backbeat from Connie Kay, that gives it a much bigger forward momentum. But there’s a few other things as well — influences from other genres that fed into rock and roll. There’s the obvious one, of the saxophone. That’s from rhythm and blues, and it’s something that rhythm and blues got from swing. Remember Ilinois Jacquet’s solo on “Flying Home” from last episode? That’s a very clear progenitor for this. But there’s also the influence of another type of song — one most people who talk about the origins of rock and roll don’t even think of as being a separate type of music, as it just gets rolled up into “blues”. The hokum song is a type of music with a long history, which can trace its origins through vaudeville back to minstrel songs. It was originally for comedy performances more than anything else, but later a whole subgenre of them started being just songs about sex. Some of the more euphemistic of them are songs like “Fishing Pole Blues”, which has lines like “want to go fishing in my fishing hole/If you want to fish with me you’d better have a great big pole”, or songs called things like “Banana in my Fruit Basket”, I Want a Hot-Dog in my Roll”, “It’s Tight Like That” and “Warm My Weiner”. There were less euphemistic songs, too, called things like “Bull Dyke Blues”, but I won’t look at those in any more detail here as I don’t want this podcast to get put in an “adults only” section. Suffice to say, there was plenty of very, very obscene music as well as the comedy songs and the more euphemistic material. And the other thing about hokum songs is that they stuck to a fairly straightforward formula. There weren’t the complicated structures of the Tin Pan Alley songs of the time, there was a simple pattern of a verse which had different lyrics every time and a chorus which was always the same, and the two would alternate. The chorus would usually be a twelve-bar blues, and more often than not so would the verse, though sometimes it would be an eight-bar blues instead. And this is the pattern that you would get in rock and roll songs throughout the fifties. It’s the pattern of “Tutti Frutti”, of “Maybelline”, of “Rock Around the Clock”, and of “Shake Rattle and Roll”. And “Shake Rattle and Roll”, while it’s not the dirtiest song in history or anything, is certainly fairly blatant about its subject matter. (Hilariously, Bill Haley’s cover version is famously “cleaned up” — they took out lines like “the way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through” and “I believe to my soul you’re the devil in nylon hose” in case they were too dirty. But they left in “I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea-food store”…) So that’s what rock and roll was, in its early stages — a blues shouter, singing over a boogie-inspired piano part, with a backbeat on the snare drum, a structure and lyrics patterned after the hokum song, and horns coming out of swing music. And there is a very, very clear line to that from “Roll ‘Em Pete”, and the boogie-woogie revival of 1938, and the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts. But wait… isn’t the cliche that rock and roll comes from R&B mixed with country music? Where’s all the country music in this? Well, that cliche is slightly wrong. Rock doesn’t have much influence from the country music, but it has a lot of influence from Western music. And for that, we’ll have to wait until next episode. Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
A special tribute and salute to the Greatest Generation and the music of their era. In addition to the featured music, the story of the Stage Door Canteens is woven between the songs. Much of the music was used as the soundtracks of the Stage Door Canteen (1943) and The Hollywood Canteen (1944) movies. The songs included in this special episode are: (1) Bugle Call Rag by Benny Goodman & His Band (2) Keep' Em Flying by Gene Krupa & His Orchestra (w/ Johhny Desmond, vocal) (3) Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy by The Andrews Sisters (w/ Vic Shoen & His Orchestra) (4) Daddy by Sammy Kaye & His Orchestra [vocals by The Kaye Choir] (5) Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition by Kay Kyser & His Orchestra (6) Kiss the Boys Goodbye by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra (w/ Connie Haines, vocal) (7) I've Heard That Song Before by Harry James & His Orchestra (Helen Forrest, vocal) (8) Three Little Sisters by The Andrews Sisters (9) Dance With A Dolly (With A Hole In Her Stocking) by Russ Morgan & His Orchestra (w/ Al Jennings, vocal) (10) Deep In The Heart Of Texas by Bing Crosby (w/ Woody Herman's Band) (11) Chattanooga Choo Choo by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra (w/ Tex Beneke, Paula Kelly & The Modernaires) (12) My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Count Basie (w/ Ethel Waters, vocal) (13) Rum And Coca-Cola by The Andrews Sisters (w/ Vic Shoen & His Orchestra) (14) We'll Meet Again by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra (w/ Peggy Lee) (15) Oh! What It Seemed To Be by Frankie Carle & His Orchestra (w/ Marjorie Hughes, vocal) (16) When The Lights Go On Again (All Over The World) by Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra (17) Hollywood Canteen by The Andrews Sisters (18) Sweet Dreams, Sweetheart by Jimmy Dorsey & His Orchestra (w/ Sally Sweetland, vocal) (19) It's Been A Long, Long Time by Harry James & His Orchestra (Kitty Kallen, vocal) (20) I Left My Heart At The Stage Door Canteen by Sammy Kaye & His Orchestra (Don Cornell, vocal) (21) V-Hop (V for Victory Hop) by Jerry Gray Orchestra
A 35-year member of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Powers has produced, engineered or served as executive producer of more than 150 record albums, including work with Will.I.Am, Tina Turner, Duran Duran, Joe Cocker, Devo, Bryan Ferry, Holly Near, The Beach Boys, Bonnie Raitt, Santana, Bob Hope and Brian Setzer Orchestra. He has earned numerous gold and platinum records that generated four #1 pop hits. In 2006, Powers joined with Michael Bernard Beckwith, Founder & Spiritual Director of the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles and movie producer Mark R. Harris, (a multiple Oscar winner, including Best Picture for “Crash”) to form Agape Media International (AMI), a company dedicated to creating transformative content in music, movies, TV, books, and digital media and promoting artists and art forms that uplift the human spirit. Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stephen Powers has 40 years of business and media production experience. Powers has served as founder, President and/or CEO of many prestigious companies, including Agape Media International; Miller & Kreisel Sound, an renowned consumer electronics manufacturer; Drive Entertainment, an audio, video and music publishing company affiliated with Universal Music; Chameleon Music Group, a trend-setting alternative rock label distributed by Capitol-EMI; and Mountain Railroad Records, a noted folk, blues and country music label. Powers also garnered an Emmy® nomination for producing the PBS television special, “Swing Alive,” starring Bob Hope, Les Brown, Sheena Easton, Suzanne Somers, Tex Beneke and other big band stars. Powers lives in Topanga with his wife Tigris, an artist and author, and their 3 young children.
Esta semana se cumplen 50 años del estreno de la película Breakfast at Tiffany's (Desayuno con diamantes), donde Audrey Hepburn estrenó una de las más bellas canciones del siglo XX: "Moon river". En este programa la escuchamos en dos versiones. La primera, instrumental, mientras Audrey Hepburn desayuna un cruasán ante los escaparates de la joyería Tiffany, en una desierta Quinta Avenida, en Nueva York, al amanecer. La segunda es la grabación íntegra de la escena en que Audrey Hepburn, acompañándose a la guitarra, canta "Moon river" en la ventana de su apartamento neoyorquino. También oímos a esta actriz cantando "How long has this been going on?", de Gershwin, en una película anterior: Funny face (Una cara con ángel). Otras canciones del programa: "Fifth Avenue" (Quinta Avenida), por la orquesta de Glenn Miller con Marion Hutton y Tex Beneke; "I can't give you anything but love" (No puedo darte nada más que amor), por Billie Holiday con el conjunto de Teddy Wilson; "Diamonds are a girl's best friend" (Los diamantes son el mejor amigo de una chica), de la película Los caballeros las prefieren rubias, donde Marilyn Monroe menciona los nombres de Tiffany, Cartier y otras joyerías; "The ruby and the pearl" (El rubí y la perla), por Nat King Cole; "Old man river'"(Viejo río), por la cantante de soul Ruth Brown; y "Buenas noches, mi amor", por el trío mexicano Los Tres Diamantes. Escuchar audio
Hush! Songs about whispering. Songs include: Whispering, Whispering Hope, Whisper in the Night and Moonlight Whispers. Performers include: Bing Crosby, Connee Boswell, The Ink Spots, Tex Beneke , Valaida Snow & Jo Stafford.
Big Band Serenade continues our shows from remotes with Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. August 10, 1939. A band remote from the Glen Island Casino, New Rochelle, New York. The first tune is, "The Lady's In Love With You." Ray Eberle sings a terible, "Twilight Interlude." Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Ray Eberle (vocal), Tex Beneke (vocal), Marion Hutton (vocal).Online Meetings Made Easy with GoToMeeting Try it Free for 45 days use Promo Code Podcast
Big Band Serenade continues our shows from remotes with Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. August 1, 1939. A band remote from The Glen Island Casino, New Rochelle, New York. The first tune is, "The Lady's In Love With You." Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Tex Beneke (vocal), Marion Hutton (vocal), Ray Eberle (vocal).Online Meetings Made Easy with GoToMeeting Try it Free for 45 days use Promo Code Podcast
Big Band Serenade present Glenn Miller and His Orchestra On The Radio,January 6, 1939. A band remote from The Paradise Restaurant, New York City. The first tune is, "The Dipper Mouth Blues." Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Marion Hutton (vocal), Ray Eberle (vocal), Tex Beneke (vocal), Howard Doyle (announcer)
Big Band Serenade presents Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. June 18, 1938. Blue Network. A band remote from the Paradise Restaurant, New York City. The first musical selection is, "The Butcher Boy." Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Gail Reese (vocal), Ray Eberle (vocal), Tex Beneke (vocal), Ben Grauer (announcer)
Big Band Serenade presents The Modernaires. The songs played in this episode are in order of play; 1)"Make Believe Ballroom",2) "The Milkman's Matinee", 3) "It's Make Believe Ballroom Time" ,4) "Perfidia",5)"Elmer's Tune" w/ Ray Eberle ,6)"Chattanooga Choo Choo",7)"Juke Box Saturday Night"-1946, 8)"Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)" w/ Maron Hutton,9) "Serenade In Blue",with Ray Eberle,10) I'v got a gal in "Kalamazoo" w/ Tex Beneke 1942,11)"Moonlight Cocktail" ,12)"That Old Black Magic"with Skip Nelsen,13)"I Know Why(And So Do You)", 14)"To Each His Own" w/ Ray Eberle
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